THE GOLDEN BOOK 

OF THE 




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Book >V 3 

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COPVRIGHT DEP9SOI 



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THE 

GOLDEN BOOK OF THE 

DUTCH NAVIGATORS 




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THE 

GOLDEN BOOK OF THE 

DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

BY 

HENDRIK WILLEM van LOON 



ILLUSTRATED WITH SEVENTY 
REPRODUCTIONS OF OLD PRINTS 




t SHP^ J &G 



NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1916 



V3 



Copyright, 1916, by 
The Century Co. 



Published, October, 1916 




CI.A445325 

■ 






FOR HANSJE AND WILLEM 

This is a story of magnificent failures. The men 
who equipped the expeditions of which I shall tell you the 
story died in the poorhouse. The men who took part in 
these voyages sacrificed their lives as cheerfully as they 
lighted a new pipe or opened a fresh bottle. Some of them 
were drowned, and some of them died of thirst. A few 
were frozen to death, and many were killed by the heat 
of the scorching sun. The bad supplies furnished by lying 
contractors buried many of them beneath the green cocoa- 
nut-trees of distant lands. Others were speared by canni- 
bals and provided a feast for the hungry tribes of the Pacific 
Islands. 

But what of it? It was all in the day's work. These 
excellent fellows took whatever came, be it good or bad; 
or indifferent, with perfect grace, and kept on smiling. 
They kept their powder dry, did whatever their hands found 
to do, and left the rest to the care of that mysterious 
Providence who probably knew more about the ultimate 
good of things than they did. 

I want you to know about these men because they were 
your ancestors. If you have inherited any of their good 
qualities, make the best of them; they will prove to be 
worth while. If you have got your share of their bad 
ones, fight these as hard as you can; for they will lead you 
a merry chase before you get through. 

Whatever you do, remember one lesson: "Keep on 
smiling." 

Hendrik Willem van Loon. 
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. 

February 29, 191 6. 

V 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

The history of America is the story of the 
conquest of the West. The history of Holland 
is the story of the conquest of the sea. The 
western frontier influenced American life, 
shaped American thought, and gave America 
the habits of self-reliance and independence of 
action which differentiate the people of the 
great republic from those of other countries. 

The wide ocean, the wind-swept highroad of 
commerce, turned a small mud-bank along the 
North Sea into a mighty commonwealth and 
created a civilization of such individual char- 
acter that it has managed to maintain its per- 
sonal traits against the aggressions of both time 
and man. 

When we discuss the events of American his- 
tory we place our scene upon a stage which 
has an immense background of wide prairie 
and high mountain. In this vast and dim ter- 

vii 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

ritory there is always room for another man of 
force and energy, and society is a rudimentary 
bond between free and sovereign human beings, 
unrestricted by any previous tradition or ordi- 
nance. Hence we study the accounts of a 
peculiar race which has grown up under con- 
ditions of complete independence and which 
relies upon its own endeavors to accomplish 
those things which it has set out to do. 

The virtues of the system are as evident as its 
faults. We know that this development is al- 
most unique in the annals of the human race. 
We know that it will disappear as soon as the 
West shall have been entirely conquered. We 
also know that the habits of mind which have 
been created during the age of the pioneer will 
survive the rapidly changing physical condi- 
tions by many centuries. For this reason those 
of us who write American history long after the 
disappearance of the typical West must still 
pay due reverence to the influence of the old 
primitive days when man was his own master 
and trusted no one but God and his own strong 
arm. 

viii 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

The history of the Dutch people during the 
last five centuries shows a very close analogy. 
The American who did not like his fate at 
home went "west." The Hollander who de- 
cided that he would be happier outside of the 
town limits of his native city went "to sea," as 
the expression was. He always had a chance 
to ship as a cabin-boy, just as his American suc- 
cessor could pull up stakes at a moment's notice 
to try his luck in the next county. Neither of 
the two knew exactly what they might find at 
the end of their voyage of adventure. Good 
luck, bad luck, middling luck, it made no dif- 
ference. It meant a change, and most fre- 
quently it meant a change for the better. Best 
of all, even if one had no desire to migrate, but, 
on the other hand, was quite contented to stay 
at home and be buried in the family vault of 
his ancestral estate, he knew at all times that 
he was free to leave just as soon as the spirit 
moved him. 

Remember this when you read Dutch his- 
tory. It is an item of grave importance. It 
was always in the mind of the mighty potentate 

ix 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

who happened to be the ruler and tax-gatherer 
of the country. He might not be willing to 
acknowledge it, he might even deny it in ve- 
hement documents of state, but in the end he 
was obliged to regulate his conduct toward his 
subjects with due respect for and reference to 
their wonderful chance of escape. The Mid- 
dle Ages had a saying that "city air makes 
free." In the Low Countries we find a won- 
derful combination of city air and the salt 
breezes of the ocean. It created a veritable at- 
mosphere of liberty, and not only the liberty of 
political activity, but freedom of thought and 
independence in all the thousand and one dif- 
ferent little things which go to make up the 
complicated machinery of human civilization. 
Wherever a man went in the country there was 
the high sky of the coastal region, and there 
were the canals which would carry his small 
vessel to the main roads of trade and ultimate 
prosperity. The sea reached up to his very 
front door. It supported him in his struggle 
for a living, and it was his best ally in his fight 
for independence. Half of his family and 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

friends lived on and by and of the sea. The 
nautical terms of the forecastle became the lan- 
guage of his land. His house reminded the 
foreign visitor of a ship's cabin. 

And finally his state became a large naval 
commonwealth, with a number of ship-owners 
as a board of directors and a foreign policy dic- 
tated by the need of the oversea commerce. 
We do not care to go into the details of this 
interesting question. It is our purpose to draw 
attention to this one great and important fact 
upon which the entire economic, social, intel- 
lectual, and artistic structure of Dutch society 
was based. For this purpose we have re- 
printed in a short and concise form the work 
of our earliest pioneers of the ocean. They 
broke through the narrow bonds of their re- 
stricted medieval world. In plain American 
terms, "They were the first to cross the Alle- 
ghanies." 

They ushered in the great period of conquest 
of West and East and South and North. They 
built their empire wherever the water of the 
ocean would carry them. They laid the foun- 

xi 



HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 

dations for a greatness which centuries of sub- 
sequent neglect have not been able to destroy, 
and which the present generation may trium- 
phantly win back if it is worthy to continue its 
existence as an independent nation. 



xn 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN .... 3 

II THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE ...... 43 

III THE TRAGEDY OF SPITZBERGEN .... 87 

IV THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA — FAILURE . 97 

V THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA — SUCCESS 135 

VI VAN NOORT CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE 

WORLD 159 

VII THE ATTACK UPON THE WEST COAST OF 

AMERICA .207 

VIII THE BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE . 249 

IX SCHOUTEN AND LE MAIRE DISCOVER A 

NEW STRAIT 279 

X TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA . . . .303 

XI ROGGEVEEN, THE LAST OF THE GREAT 

VOYAGERS 32S 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 



THE GOLDEN BOOK OF THE 
DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

CHAPTER I 
JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

IT was the year of our Lord 1579, and the 
eleventh of the glorious revolution of 
Holland against Spain. Brielle had been 
taken by a handful of hungry sea-beggars. 
Haarlem and Naarden had been murdered out 
by a horde of infuriated Spanish regulars. 
Alkmaar — little Alkmaar, hidden behind lakes, 
canals, open fields with low willows and 
marshes — had been besieged, had turned the 
welcome waters of the Zuyder Zee upon the 
enemy, and had driven the enemy away. Alva, 
the man of iron who was to destroy this people 
of butter between his steel gloves, had left the 
stage of his unsavory operations in disgrace. 
The butter had dribbled away between his 

3 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

fingers. Another Spanish governor had ap- 
peared. Another failure. Then a third one. 
Him the climate and the brilliant days of his 
youth had killed. 

But in the heart of Holland, William, of the 
House of Nassau, heir to the rich princes of 
Orange, destined to be known as the Silent, the 
Cunning One — this same William, broken in 
health, broken in money, but high of courage, 
marshaled his forces and, with the despair of a 
last chance, made ready to clear his adopted 
country of the hated foreign domination. 

Everywhere in the little terrestrial triangle 
of this newest of republics there was the activity 
of men who had just escaped destruction by the 
narrowest of margins. They had faith in their 
own destiny. Any one who can go through an 
open rebellion against the mightiest of mon- 
archs and come out successfully deserves the 
commendation of the Almighty. The Hol- 
landers had succeeded. Their harbors, the 
lungs of the country, were free once more, and 
could breathe the fresh air of the open sea and 
of commercial prosperity. 

4 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

On the land the Spaniard still held his own, 
but on the water the Hollander was master of 
the situation. The ocean, which had made his 
country what it was, which had built the 
marshes upon which he lived, which provided 
the highway across which he brought home his 
riches, was open to his enterprise. 

He must go out in search of further adven- 
ture. Thus far he had been the common car- 
rier of Europe. His ships had brought the 
grain from the rich Baltic provinces to the 
hungry waste of Spain. His fishermen had 
supplied the fasting table of Catholic humanity 
with the delicacy of pickled herring. From 
Venice and later on from Lisbon he had carried 
the products of the Orient to the farthest cor- 
ners of the Scandinavian peninsula. It was 
time for him to expand. 

The role of middleman is a good role for 
modest and humble folk who make a decent 
living by taking a few pennies here and collect- 
ing a few pennies there, but the chosen people 
of God must follow their destiny upon the 
broad highway of international commerce 

5 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

wherever they can. Therefore the Hollander 
must go to India. 

It was easily said. But how was one to get 
there? 

Jan Huygen van Linschoten was born in the 
year 1563 in the town of Haarlem. As a small 
boy he was taken to Enkhuizen. At the pres- 
ent time Enkhuizen is hardly more than a 
country village. Three hundred years ago it 
was a big town with high walls, deep moats, 
strong towers, and a local board of aldermen 
who knew how to make the people keep the 
laws and fear God. It had several churches 
where the doctrines of the great master Johan- 
nes Calvinus were taught with precision and 
without omitting a single piece of brimstone or 
extinguishing a single flame of an ever-gaping 
hell. It had orphan asylums and hospitals. It 
had a fine jail, and a school with a horny- 
handed tyrant who taught the A B C's and the 
principles of immediate obedience with due 
reference to that delightful text about the 
spoiled child and the twigs of a birch-tree. 

6 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Outside of the city, when once you had passed 
the gallows with its rattling chains and aggres- 
sive ravens, there were miles and miles of green 
pasture. But upon one side there was the blue 
water of the quiet Zuyder Zee. Here small 
vessels could approach the welcome harbor, 
lined on both sides with gabled storehouses. 
It is true that when the tide was very low the 
harbor looked like a big muddy trough. But 
these flat-bottomed contraptions rested upon the 
mud with ease and comfort, and the next tide 
would again lift them up, ready for farther 
peregrinations. Over the entire scene there 
hung the air of prosperity. A restless energy 
was in the air. On all sides there was evidence 
of the gospel of enterprise. It was this enter- 
prise that collected the money to build the ships. 
It was this enterprise, combined with nautical 
cunning, that pushed these vessels to the ends of 
the European continent in quest of freight and 
trade. It was this enterprise that turned the 
accumulating riches into fine mansions and 
good pictures, and gave a first-class education 
to all boys and girls. It walked proudly along 

8 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

the broad streets where the best families lived. 
It stalked cheerfully through the narrow alleys 
when the sailor came back to his wife and chil- 
dren. It followed the merchant into his count- 
ing-room, and it played with the little boys who 
frequented the quays and grew up in a blissful 
atmosphere of tallow, tar, gin, spices, dried fish, 
and fantastic tales of foreign adventure. 

And it played the very mischief with our 
young hero. For when Jan Huygen was six* 
teen years old, and had learned his three R's — 
reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic — he shipped as 
a cabin-boy to Spain, and said farewell to his 
native country, to return after many years as the 
missing link in the chain of commercial ex- 
plorations — the one and only man who knew the 
road to India. 

Here the industrious reader interrupts me. 
How could this boy go to Spain when his coun- 
try was at war with its master, King Philip? 
Indeed, this statement needs an explanation. 

Spain in the sixteenth century was a mag- 
nificent example of the failure of imperial 

9 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

expansion minus a knowledge of elementary 
economics. Here we had a country which 
owned the better part of the world. It was rich 
beyond words and it derived its opulence from 
every quarter of the globe. For centuries a 
steady stream of bullion flowed into Spanish 
coffers. Alas! it flowed out of them just as 
rapidly; for Spain, with all its foreign glory, 
was miserably poor at home. Her people had 
never been taught to work. The soil did not 
provide food enough for the population of the 
large peninsula. Every biscuit, so to speak, 
every loaf of bread, had to be imported from 
abroad. Unfortunately, the grain business was 
in the hands of these same Dutch Calvinists 
whose nasal theology greatly offended his Maj- 
esty King Philip. Therefore during the first 
years of the rebellion the harbors of the Spanish 
kingdom had been closed against these unre- 
generate singers of Psalms. Whereupon Spain 
went hungry, and was threatened with starva- 
tion. 

Economic necessity conquered religious prej- 
udice. The ports of King Philip's domain 

10 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

once more were opened to the grain-ships of the 
Hollanders and remained open until the end of 
the war. The Dutch trader never bothered 
about the outward form of things provided he 
got his profits. He knew how to take a hint. 
Therefore, when he came to a Spanish port, he 
hoisted the Danish flag or sailed under the col- 
ors of Hamburg and Bremen. There still was 
the difficulty of the language, but the Spaniard 
was made to understand that this guttural com- 
bination of sounds represented diverse Scandi- 
navian tongues. The tactful custom-officers of 
his Most Catholic Majesty let it go at that, and 
cheerfully welcomed these heretics without 
whom they could not have fed their own 
people. 

When Jan Huygen left his own country he 
had no definite plans beyond a career of adven- 
ture; for then, as he wrote many years later, 
"When you come home, you have something to 
tell your children when you get old." In 1579 
he left Enkhuizen, and in the winter of the next 
year he arrived in Spain. First of all he did 
some clerical work in the town of Seville, where 

11 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

he learned the Spanish language. Next he 
went to Lisbon, where he became familiar with 
Portuguese. He seems to have been a likable 
boy who did cheerfully whatever he found to 
do, but watched with a careful eye the chance 
to meet with his next adventure. After three 
years of a roving existence, with rare good luck, 
he met Vincente da Fonseca, a Dominican who 
had just been appointed Archbishop of Goa in 
the Indies. Jan Huygen obtained a position as 
general literary factotum to the new dignitary 
and also acted as purser for the captain of the 
ship. 

At the age of twenty he was an integral mem- 
ber of a bona-fide expedition to the mysterious 
Indies. Through his account of this trip, 
printed in 1595, the Dutch traders at last 
learned to know the route to the Indies. The 
expedition left Lisbon on Good Friday of the 
year 1583 with forty ships. During the first 
few weeks nothing happened. Nothing ever 
happened during the first weeks on any of those 
expeditions. The trouble invariably began 
after the first rough weather. In this instance 

12 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

everything went well until the end of April, 
when the coast of Guinea had been reached. 
Then the fleet entered a region of squalls and 
severe rainstorms. The rain collected on the 
decks and ran down the hatchways. A dozen 
times or so a day the fleet had to come to a stop 
while all hands bailed out the water which 
filled the holds. When it did not rain the sun 
beat down mercilessly, and soon the atmosphere 
of the soaked wood became unpleasant. To 
make things worse the drinking water was no 
longer fresh, and smelled so badly that one 
could not drink it without closing the unfortu- 
nate nose that came near the cup. 

On the whole the printed work of Jan Huy- 
gen does not show him as an admirer of the 
Portuguese or their system of navigation. In 
all his writing he gives us the impression of a 
very sober-minded young Hollander with a lot 
of common sense. Portugal had then been a 
colonial power for many years and showed un- 
mistakable signs of deterioration. The people 
had been too prosperous. They were no longer 
willing to defend their own interests against 

13 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

other and younger nations. They still exer- 
cised their Indian monopoly because it had been 
theirs for so long a time that no one remem- 
bered anything to the contrary. But the end of 
things had come. Upon every page of Jan 
Huygen's book we find the same evidence of 
bad organization, little jealousies, spite, dis- 
obedience, cowardice, and lack of concerted 
action. 

When only a few weeks from home this fleet 
of forty ships encountered a single small French 
vessel. Part of the Portuguese crew of the fleet 
was sick. The others made ready to flee at 
once. After a few hours it was seen that the 
Frenchman had no evil intentions, and contin- 
ued his way without a closer inspection of his 
enemies. Then peace returned to the fleet of 
Fonseca. 

A few days later the ship reached the equator. 
The customary initiation of the new sailors, fol- 
lowed by the usual festivities and a first-class 
drunken row, took place. The captain was run 
down and trampled upon by his men, tables and 
chairs were upset, and the crew fought one an- 

14 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

other with knives. This quarrel might have 
ended in a general murder but for the interfer- 
ence of the archbishop, who threw himself 
among the crazy sailors, and with a threat of 
excommunication drove them back to work. 
Half a dozen were locked up, others were 
whipped, and the ships continued their voyage 
in this happy-go-lucky fashion. Then it ap- 
peared that nobody knew exactly where they 
were. Observations finally showed that the 
fleet was still fifty miles west of the Cape of 
Good Hope. As a matter of fact, they had 
passed the cape several days before, but did not 
discover their error until a week later. Then 
they sailed northward until they reached Mo- 
zambique, where they spent two weeks in order 
to give the crew a rest and to repair the dam- 
ages of the equatorial fight. On the twentieth 
of August they continued their voyage until the 
serpents which they saw in the water showed 
them that they were approaching the coast of 
India. From that time on luck was with the 
expedition. The ships reached the coast near 
the town of destination. After a remarkably 

15 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

short passage of only five months and thirteen 
days the fleet landed safely in Goa. 

Jan Huygen was very proud of the record of 
his ship. Only thirty people had died on the 
voyage. It is true that all the people on board 
had been under a doctor's care, and every one of 
the sailors and passengers had been bled a few 
times; but thirty men buried during so long a 
voyage was a mere trifle. In the sixteenth cen- 
tury, if fifty per cent, of the men returned from 
an Indian voyage, the trip was considered suc- 
cessful. 

The next five years Jan Huygen spent in Goa 
with his ecclesiastical master. He was in- 
trusted with a great deal of confidential work, 
and became thoroughly familiar with all the 
affairs of the colony. In Goa he heard won- 
derful tales about the great Chinese Empire, 
many weeks to the north. He began to collect 
maps for an expedition to that distant land, but 
lack of funds made him put it off, and he never 
went far beyond the confines of the small Por- 
tuguese settlement. 

Unfortunately, at the end of five years the 
16 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

archbishop died, and Jan Huygen was without 
a job. As he had had news that his father had 
died, he now decided to go back to Enkhuizen 
to see what he could do for his mother. Ac- 
cordingly, in January of the year 1589, he sailed 
for home on board the good ship Santa Maria. 
It was the same old story of bad management: 
The ships of the return fleet were all loaded too 
heavily. The handling of the cargo was left 
entirely to ship-brokers, and these worthies had 
developed a noble system of graft. Merchan- 
dise was loaded according to a regular tariff of 
bribes. If you were willing to pay enough, 
your goods went neatly into the hold. If you 
did not give a certain percentage to the brokers, 
your bags and bales were stowed away some- 
where on a corner of a wharf exposed to the 
rain and the sea. Very likely, too, the first 
storm would wash your valuable possessions 
overboard. 

When the Santa Maria left, her decks were 
stacked high with disorderly masses of colonial 
products. The sailors on duty had to make a 
path through this accumulated stuff, and the 

17 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

captain lacked the authority to put his own ship 
in order. A few days out a cabin-boy fell over- 
board. The sea was quiet, and it would have 
been possible to save the child, but when the 
crew ran for a boat, it was found to be filled 
with heavy boxes. By the time the boat was at 
last lowered the boy had drowned. 

The Santa Maria sailed direct for the Cape. 
There it fell in with another vessel called the 
San Thome, and it now became a matter of 
pride which ship could round the cape first. 
Severe western winds made the Santa Maria 
wait several days. The San Thome, however, 
ventured forth to brave the gale. When finally 
the storm had abated and the Santa Maria had 
reached the Atlantic Ocean, the bodies and 
pieces of wreckage which floated upon the 
water told what had happened to the other ves- 
sel. This, however, was only the beginning of 
trouble. On the fifth of March the Santa 
Maria was almost lost. Her rudder broke, and 
it could not be repaired. A storm, accompa- 
nied by a tropical display of thunder and light- 
ning, broke loose. For more than forty-eight 

18 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

hours the ship was at the mercy of the waves. 
The crew spent the time on deck absorbed in 
prayer. When little electric flames began to 
appear upon the masts and yards (the so-called 
St. Elmo's fire, a spooky phenomenon to all sail- 
ors of all times), they felt sure that the end of 
the world had come. The captain commanded 
all his men to pray the "Salvo corpo Sancto," 
and this was done with great demonstrations of 
fervor. The celestial fireworks, however, did 
not abate. On the contrary the crew witnessed 
the appearance of a five-pointed crown, which 
showed itself upon the mainmast, and was 
hailed with cries of the "crown of the Holy 
Virgin." After this final electric display the 
storm went on its way. 

In his sober fashion Jan Huygen had looked 
on. He did not take much stock in this sudden 
piety, and called it "a lot of of useless noise." 
Then he watched the men repairing the rudder. 
It was discovered that there was no anvil on 
board the ship, and a gun was used as an anvil. 
A pair of bellows was improvised out of some 
old skins. With this contrivance some sort of 

19 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

steering-gear was finally rigged up, and the 
voyage was continued. After that, except for 
occasional and very sudden squalls, when all the 
sails had to be lowered to save them from being 
blown to pieces, the Santa Maria was past her 
greatest danger, though the heavy seas caused 
by a prolonged storm proved to be another ob- 
stacle. No further progress was possible until 
the ship had been lightened. For this purpose 
the large boat and all its valuable contents were 
simply thrown overboard. 

The recital of Jan Huygen's trip is a long 
epic of bungling. The captain did not know 
his job; the officers were incompetent; the men 
were unruly and ready to mutiny at the slight- 
est provocation; and everybody blamed every- 
body else for everything that went wrong. The 
captain, in the last instance, accused the good 
Lord, Who "would not allow His own faithful 
people to pass the Cape of Good Hope with 
their strong and mighty ships," while making 
the voyage an easy one for "the blasphemous 
English heretics with their little insignificant 
schooners." In this statement there was more 

21 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

wisdom than the captain suspected. The Eng- 
lish sailors knew their business and could afford 
to take risks. The Portuguese sailors of that 
day hastened from one coastline and from one 
island to the next, as they had done a century 
before. As long as they were on the high seas 
they were unhappy. They returned to life 
when they were in port. Every time the Santa 
Maria passed a few days in some harbor we get 
a recital of the joys of that particular bit of 
paradise. If we are to believe Portuguese tra- 
dition, St. Helena, where the ship passed a week 
of the month of May of the year 1589, was 
placed in its exact geographical position by the 
Almighty to serve His faithful children as a 
welcome resting-point upon their perilous voy- 
age to the far Indies. The island was full of 
goats, wild pigs, chickens, partridges, and thou- 
sands of pigeons, all of which creatures allowed 
themselves to be killed with the utmost ease, 
and furnished food for generations of sailors 
who visited those shores. 

Indeed, this island was so healthy a spot that 
it was used as a general infirmary. After a few 

22 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

days on shore even the weakest of sufferers was 
sufficiently strong to catch specimens of the 
wild fauna of the island. Often, therefore, the 
sick sailors were left behind. With a little salt 
and some oil and a few spices they could sup- 
port themselves easily until the next ship came 
along and picked them up. We know what 
ailed most of these stricken sailors. They suf- 
fered from scurvy, due to a bad diet; but it took 
several centuries before the cause of scurvy was 
discovered. When Jan Huygen went to the 
Indies the crew of every ship was invariably at- 
tacked by this most painful disease. Therefore 
the islands were of great importance. 

Nowadays St. Helena is no longer a paradise. 
Three centuries ago it was the one blessed point 
of relief for the Indian traders. The diary of 
Jan Huygen tells of attempts made to colonize 
the island. The King of Portugal, however, 
had forbidden any settlement upon this solitary 
rock. For a while it had harbored a number of 
runaway slaves. Whenever a ship came near 
they had fled to the mountains. Finally, how- 
ever, they had been caught and taken back to 

23 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Portugal and sold. For a long time the island 
had been inhabited by a pious hermit. He had 
built a small chapel, and there the visiting sail- 
ors were allowed to worship. In his spare 
time, however, the holy man had hunted goats, 
and he had entered into an export business of 
goat-skins. Every year between five and six 
hundred skins were sold. Then this ingenious 
scheme was discovered, and the saintly hunter 
was sent home. 

On the twenty-first of May the Santa Maria 
continued her northward course. Again bad 
food and bad water caused illness among the 
men. A score of them died. Often they hid 
themselves somewhere in the hold, and had 
been dead for several days before they made 
their presence noticeable. It was miserable 
business; and now, with a ship of sick and dis- 
abled men, the Santa Maria was doomed to 
fall in with three small British vessels. At 
once there was a panic among the Portuguese 
sailors. The British hoisted their pennant, and 
opened with a salvo of guns. The Portuguese 
fled below decks, and the English, in sport, shot 

24 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

the sails to pieces. The crew of the Santa 
Maria tried to load their heavy cannon, but 
there was such a mass of howling and swearing 
humanity around the guns that it took hours be- 
fore anything could be done. The ships were 
then very near one another, and the British 
sailors could be heard jeering at the cowardice 
of their prey. But just when Jan Huygen 
thought the end had come the British squadron 
veered around and disappeared. The Santa 
Maria then reached Terceira in the Azores 
without further molestation. 

Like all other truthful chroniclers of his day, 
Jan Huygen speculates about the mysterious 
island of St. Brandon. This blessed isle was 
supposed to be situated somewhere between the 
Azores and the Canary Islands, but nearer to 
the Canaries. As late as 1721 expeditions were 
fitted out to search for the famous spot upon 
which the Irish abbot of the sixth century had 
located the promised land of the saints. To- 
gether with the recital of another mysterious 
bit of land consisting of the back of a gigantic 
fish, this story had been duly chronicled by a 

25 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

succession of Irish monks, and when Jan Huy- 
gen visited these regions he was told of these 
strange islands far out in the ocean where the 
first travelers had discovered a large and pros- 
perous colony of Christians who spoke an un- 
known language and whose city could disappear 
beneath the surface of the ocean if an enemy 
approached. 

Once in the roads of Terceira, however, there 
was little time for theological investigations. 
Rumor had it that a large number of British 
ships were in the immediate neighborhood. 
Strict orders had come from Lisbon that all 
Portuguese and Spanish ships must stay in port 
under protection of the guns of the fortifica- 
tions. Just a year before that the Armada had 
started out for the conquest of England and the 
Low Countries. The Invincible Armada had 
been destroyed by the Lord, the British, and the 
Dutch. Now the tables had been turned, and 
the Dutch and British vessels were attacking 
the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The 
story of inefficient navigation is here supple- 
mented by a recital of bad military manage- 

26 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

ment. The roads of Terceira were very dan- 
gerous. In ordinary times no ships were al- 
lowed to anchor there. A very large number 
of vessels were now huddled together in too 
small a space. These vessels were poorly 
manned, for the Portuguese sailors, whenever 
they arrived in port, went ashore and left the 
care of their ship to a few cabin-boys and black 
slaves. The unexpected happened; during the 
night of the fourth of August a violent storm 
swept over the roads. The ships were thrown 
together with such violence that a large num- 
ber were sunk. In the town the bells were 
rung, and the sailors ran to the shore. They 
could do nothing but look on and see how their 
valuable ships were driven together and broken 
to splinters, while pieces of the cargo were 
washed all over the shore, to be stolen by the 
inhabitants of the greedy little town. When 
morning came, the shore was littered with silk, 
golden coin, china, and bales of spices. For- 
tunately the wind changed later in the morn- 
ing, and a good deal of the cargo was salved, 
But once on shore it was immediately confis- 

27 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

cated by officials from the custom-house, who 
claimed it for the benefit of the royal treasury. 
Then there followed a first-class row between 
the officials and the owners of the goods, who 
cursed their own Government quite as cheer- 
fully as they had done their enemies a few days 
before. 

To make a long story short, after a lawsuit of 
two years and a half the crown at last returned 
fifty per cent, of the goods to the merchants. 
The other half was retained for customs duty. 
Jan Huygen, who was an honest man, was asked 
to remain on the island and look after the in- 
terests of the owners while they themselves went 
to Lisbon to plead their cause before the courts. 
He now had occasion to study Portuguese man- 
agement in one of the oldest of their colonies. 
The principles of hard common sense which 
were to distinguish Dutch and British methods 
of colonizing were entirely absent. Their 
place was taken by a complicated system of the- 
ological explanations. The disaster that befell 
these islands was invariably due to divine Provi- 
dence. The local authorities were always up 

28 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

against an "act of God." While Jan Huygen 
was in Terceira the colony was at the mercy of 
the British. The privateers waited for all the 
ships that returned from South America and 
the Indies, and intercepted these rich cargoes in 
sight of the Portuguese fortifications. When 
the Englishmen needed fresh meat they stole 
goats from the little islands situated in the 
roads. Finally, after almost an entire year, a 
Spanish-Portuguese fleet of more than thirty 
large ships was sent out to protect the traders. 
In a fight with the squadron of Admiral How- 
ard the ship of his vice-admiral, Grenville, was 
sunk. The vice-admiral himself, mortally 
wounded, was made a prisoner and brought on 
board a Spanish man-of-war. There he died. 
His body was thrown overboard without fur- 
ther ceremonies. 

At once, so the story ran, a violent storm had 
broken loose. This storm lasted a week. It 
came suddenly, and when the wind fell only 
thirty ships were left out of a total of one hun- 
dred and forty that had been in the harbors of 
the islands. The damage was so great that the 

29 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

loss of the Armada itself seemed insignificant. 
Of course it was all the fault of the good Lord. 
He had deserted His own people and had gone 
over to the side of the heretics. He had sent 
this hurricane to punish the unceremonious way 
in which dead Grenville had been thrown into 
the ocean. And of course this unbelieving 
Britisher himself had at once descended into 
Hades, had called upon all the servants of the 
black demon to help him, and had urged this 
revenge. Evidently the thing worked both 
ways. 

This clever argument did not in the least 
help the unfortunate owners of the shipwrecked 
merchandise. One fine day they were in- 
formed that they could no longer expect royal 
protection for the future. Jan Huygen was 
told to come to Lisbon as best he could. He 
finally found a ship, and after an absence of 
nine years returned to Lisbon. On his trip to 
Holland he was almost killed in a collision. 
Finally, within sight of his native land, he was 
nearly wrecked on the banks of one of the 
North Sea islands. On the third of September 

30 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

of the year 1592, however, after an absence of 
thirteen years, he returned safely to Enkhuizen. 
His mother, brother, and sisters were there to 
welcome him. 

He did not at once rush into print. It was 
not necessary. The news of his return spread 
quickly to the offices of the Amsterdam mer- 
chants. They had been very active during the 
last dozen years and they had conducted an ef- 
ficient secret organization in Portugal, trying 
to buy up maps and books of navigation and, 
perhaps, even a pilot or two. They knew a few 
things, and guessed at many others. A man 
who had actually been there, who knew con- 
crete facts where other people suspected, such a 
man was worth while. Jan Huygen became 
consulting pilot to Dutch capital. 

The Dutch merchants still found themselves 
in a very difficult position. They had to enter 
this field of activity when their predecessors had 
been at work for almost two centuries. These 
predecessors, judging by outward evidences, 
were fast losing both ability and energy. But 
prestige before an old and well-established name 

3i 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

is a strong influence in the calculations of men. 
Those who directed the new Dutch Republic 
did not lack courage. All the same, they 
shrank from open and direct competition with 
the mighty Spanish Empire. Besides, there 
were other considerations of a more practical 
nature. 

The Middle Ages, both late and early, dearly 
loved monopoly. Indeed, the entire period be- 
tween the days of the old Roman Empire and 
the latter part of the eighteenth century, when 
the French Revolution destroyed the old system, 
was a time of monopolies or of quarrels about, 
and for, monopolies. The Dutch traders won- 
dered whether they could not obtain a little 
private route to India, something that should be 
Dutch all along the line, and could be closed at 
will to all outsiders. What about the North- 
eastern Passage? There seem to have been 
vague rumors about a water route along the 
north of Siberia. That part of the map was 
but little known. The knowledge of Russia had 
improved since the days when Moscow was sit- 
uated upon the exact spot where the ocean be- 

32 



Arctic occa/m 



3P35S5"™ ?5r57573T 




CaPC OP CooO nope 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

tween Iceland and Norway is deepest. The 
White Sea was fairly well known, and Dutch 
traders had found their way to the Russian port 
of Archangel. What lay beyond the White Sea 
was a matter of conjecture. Whether the Cas- 
pian Sea, like the White Sea, was part of the 
Arctic Sea or part of the Indian Ocean no one 
knew. But it appeared that farther to the 
north, several days beyond the North Cape, 
there was a narrow strait between an island 
which the Russians called the New Island 
(Nova Zembla) and the continent of Asia. 
This might prove to be a shorter and less dan- 
gerous route to China and the Indies. Further- 
more, by building fortifications on both sides of 
the narrows between the island and the Siberian 
coast, the Hollanders would be the sole owners 
of the most exclusive route to India. They 
could then leave the long and tedious trip around 
the Cape of Good Hope, with its perils of 
storms, scurvy, royal and inquisitorial dungeons, 
savage negroes, and several other unpleasant in- 
cidents, to their esteemed enemies. 

The men who were most interested in this 
34 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

northern enterprise were two merchants who 
lived in Middleburg, the capital of the province 
of Zeeland. The better known of the two was 
Balthasar de Moucheron, an exile from Ant- 
werp. When the Spanish Government recon- 
quered this rich town it had banished all those 
merchants who refused to give up their Luth- 
eran or Calvinistic convictions. Their wealth 
was confiscated by the state. They themselves 
were forced to make a new start in foreign lands. 
The foolishness of this decree never seems to 
have dawned upon the Spanish authorities. 
They felt happy that they had ruined and exiled 
a number of heretics. What they did not un- 
derstand was that these heretics did not owe 
their success to their wealth, but to the sheer 
ability of their minds, and before long these pen- 
niless pilgrims had laid the foundations for new 
fortunes. Then they strove with all their might 
to be revenged upon the Government which had 
ruined them. 

De Moucheron, one of this large group which 
had been expelled, had begun life anew in 
the free Republic and was soon among the 

35 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

greatest promoters of his day. Of tireless en- 
ergy and of a very bitter ambition, none too 
kindly to the leading business men of his 
adopted country, he got hold of Jan Huygen 
and decided to try his luck in a great gamble. 
He interested several of the minor capitalists of 
Enkhuizen, and on the fifth of June of the year 
1594 Jan Huygen went upon his first polar ex- 
ploration with two ships, the Mercurius and 
the Lwaan. Without adventure the ships 
passed the North Cape, sailed along the coast 
of the Kola peninsula, where Willoughby had 
wintered just forty years before, and reached 
the Straits of Waigat, the prospective Gibraltar 
of Dutch aspirations. The conditions of the ice 
were favorable. 

On the first of August of the year 1594 the 
two ships entered the Kara Sea, which they 
called the New North Sea. Then following the 
coast, they entered Kara Bay. After a few days 
Jan Huygen discovered the small Kara River, 
the present frontier between Russia and Siberia. 
He mistook it for the Obi River, and thought 
that he had gone sufficiently eastward to be cer- 

36 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

tain of the practicability of the new route which 
he had set out to discover. The ice had all 
melted. As far as he could see there was open 
water. He cruised about in this region for sev- 
eral weeks, discovered a number of little islands, 
and sprinkled the names of all his friends and 
his employers upon capes and rivers and moun- 
tains. Finally, contented with what had been 
accomplished, he returned home. On the six- 
teenth of September of the same year he came 
back to the roads of Texel. 

After that he was regarded as the leader 
in all matters of navigation. The stadholder, 
Prince Maurice, who had succeeded his father 
William after the latter had been murdered by 
one of King Philip's gunmen, sent for Jan Huy- 
gen to come to The Hague and report in person 
upon his discoveries. John of Barneveldt, the 
clever manager of all the financial and political 
interests of the republic, discussed with him the 
possibility of a successful northeastern trading 
company. Before another year was over Jan 
Huygen, this time at the head of a fleet of seven 
ships, was sent northward for a second voyage. 

37 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Everybody, from his Highness the stadholder 
down to the speculator who had risked his last 
pennies, had the greatest expectations. Noth- 
ing came of this expedition. As a matter of 
fact, Jan Huygen had met with exceptionally 
favorable weather conditions upon his first voy- 
age ; on the second he came in for the customary 
storms and blizzards. His ships were frozen in 
the ice, and for weeks they could not move. 
Scurvy attacked the crew and many men died. 

In October of the same year he was back in 
Holland. The only result of the costly expedi- 
tion was a dead whale that the captain had towed 
home as an exhibit of his good intentions. He 
was still a young man, not more than forty-five, 
but he had had his share of adventures. He did 
not join the third trip to the North in the next 
year, about which we shall give a detailed ac- 
count in our next chapter. He was appointed 
treasurer of his native city. There he lived as 
its most respected citizen until the year 1611, 
when he died and was buried with great solem- 
nity. His work had been done. 

In the year 1595 the "Itinerary of His Voyage 
38 



JAN HUYGEN VAN LINSCHOTEN 

to the East Indies" had been published. By this 
book he will always be remembered. For a 
century it provided a practical handbook of nav- 
igation which guided the Dutch traders to the 
Indies, allowed them to attack the Spaniards 
and Portuguese in their most vulnerable spot, 
and gave them the opportunity to found a co- 
lonial empire which has lasted to this very day. 



39 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 



CHAPTER II 
THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

AMSTERDAM, the capital of the new 
Dutch commonwealth, the rich city 
which alone counted more people 
within her wide walls than all of the 
country provinces put together, had ever been 
the leader in all matters which offered the 
chance of an honest penny. Her intellectual 
glory was a reflected one, her artistic fame was 
imported from elsewhere; but her exchange 
dictated its own terms to the rest of the country 
and to the rest of the world. When the Estates 
of the Republic gave up the hope of finding the 
route to India through the frozen Arctic Ocean, 
Amsterdam had the courage of her nautical con- 
victions, and at her own expense she equipped 
a last expedition to proceed northward and dis- 
cover this famous route, which had the advan- 
tage of being short and safe. 

43 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Out of this expedition grew the famous voy- 
age of Barendsz and Heemskerk to Nova Zem- 
bla, the first polar expedition of which we pos- 
sess a precise account. There were two ships. 
They were small vessels, for no one wished to 
risk a large investment on an expedition to the 
dangerous region of ice and snow. Fewer than 
fifty men took part, and all had been selected 
with great care. Married men were not taken; 
for this expedition might last many years, and 
it must not be spoiled by the homesick discon- 
tent of fathers of families. 

Jan Corneliszoon de Ryp was captain of the 
smaller vessel. The other one was commanded 
by Jacob van Heemskerk, a remarkable man, an 
able sailor who belonged to an excellent family 
and entered the merchant marine at a time when 
the sea was reserved for those who left shore 
for the benefit of civic peace and sobriety. He 
had enjoyed a good education, knew something 
about scientific matters, and had been in the 
Arctic a year before with the last and unfortu- 
nate expedition of Linschoten. The real leader 
of this expedition, however, was a very simple 

44 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

fellow, a pilot by the name of Willem, the son of 
Barend (Barendsz, as it is written in Dutch). 
He was born on the island of Terschelling and 
had been familiar with winds and tides since 
early childhood. Barendsz had two Northern 
expeditions to his credit, and had seen as much 
of the coast of Siberia as anybody in the country. 
A man of great resource and personal courage, 
combined with a weird ability to guess his ap- 
proximate whereabouts, he guided the expedi- 
tion safely through its worst perils. He died in 
a small open boat in the Arctic Sea. Without 
his devoted services none of the men who were 
with him would ever have seen his country 
again. 

There was one other member of the ship's 
staff who must be mentioned before the story of 
the trip itself is told. That was the ship's doc- 
tor. Officially he was known as the ship's bar- 
ber, for the professions of cutting whiskers and 
bleeding people were combined in those happy 
days. De Veer was a versatile character. He 
played the flute, organized amateur theatrical 
performances, kept everybody happy, and finally 

45 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

he wrote the itinerary of the trip, of which we 
shall translate the most important part. 

From former expeditions the sailors had 
learned what to take with them and what to 
leave at home. Unfortunately, contractors, then 
as now, were apt to be scoundrels, and the pro- 
visions were not up to the specifications. Dur- 
ing the long night of the Arctic winter men's 
lives depended upon the biscuits that had been 
ordered in Amsterdam, and these were found to 
be lacking in both quality and quantity. There 
were more complaints of the same nature. As 
the leaders of the expedition fully expected to 
reach China, they took a fair-sized cargo of trad- 
ing material, so that the Hollanders might have 
something to offer the heathen Chinee in ex- 
change for the riches of paradise which this dis- 
tant and mysterious land was said to possess. On 
the eighteenth of May everything was ready. 
Without any difficulty the Arctic Circle was 
soon reached and passed. Then the trouble 
began. When two Dutch sailors of great abil- 
ity and equal stubbornness disagree about points 
of the compass there is little chance for an agree- 

4 6 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

ment. The astronomical instruments of that day 
allowed certain calculations, but in a rather re- 
stricted field. As long as land was near it was 
possible to sail with a certain degree of precision, 
but when they were far away from any solid in- 
dications of charted islands and continent the 




captains of that day were often completely at a 
loss as to their exact whereabouts. 

The reason why two of the previous expedi- 
tions had failed was known: the ships had been 
driven into a blind alley called the Kara Sea. 
In order to avoid a repetition of that occurrence 
it was deemed necessary to try a more northern 

47 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

course. Barendsz, however, wanted to go due 
northeast, while De Ryp favored a course more 
to the west. For the moment the two captains 
compromised and stayed together. On the fifth 
of June the sailor on watch in the crow's-nest 
called out that he saw a lot of swans. The 
swans were soon found to be ice, the first that 
was seen that year. 

Four days later a new island was discovered. 
Barendsz thought it must be part of Greenland. 
After all, he argued, he had been right; the ships 
had been driven too far westward. De Ryp de- 
nied this, and his calculation proved to be true. 
The ships were still far away from Greenland. 
The islands belonged to the Spitzbergen Archi- 
pelago. On the nineteenth of June they dis- 
covered Spitzbergen. The name (steep moun- 
tains) describes the island. An expedition was 
sent ashore, after which we get the first recital 
of one of the endless fights with bears that 
greatly frightened the good people in those days 
of blunderbusses. Nowadays polar bears, while 
still far removed from harmless kittens, offer no 
grave danger to modern guns. But the bullets 

48 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

of the small cannon which four centuries ago 
did service as a rifle refused to penetrate the 
thick hide of a polar bear. The pictures of De 
Veer's book indicate that these hungry mammals 
were not destroyed until they had been attacked 
by half a dozen men with gunpowder, axes, 
spears, and meat-choppers. 

A very interesting discovery was made on this 
new island. Every winter wild geese came to 
the Dutch island of the North Sea. Four cen- 
turies ago they were the subject of vague ornith- 
ological speculations, for, according to the best 
authorities of the day, these geese did not behave 
like chickens and other fowl, which brought up 
their families out of a corresponding number of 
eggs. No, their chicks grew upon regular trees 
in the form of wild nuts. After a while these 
nuts tumbled into the sea and then became geese. 
Barendsz killed some of the birds and he also 
opened their eggs. There were the young 
chicks! The old myth was destroyed. "But," 
as he pleasantly remarked, "it is not our fault that 
we have not known this before, when these birds 
insist upon breeding so far northward." 

49 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 



On the twenty-fifth of June, Spitzbergen was 
left behind, and once more a dispute broke out 
between the two skippers over the old question of 




the course which was to be taken. Like good 
Dutchmen, they decided that each should go his 
own way, De Ryp preferred to try his luck 
farther to the north. Barendsz and Heemskerk 
decided to go southward. They said farewell 
to their comrades, and on the seventeenth of July 
reached the coast of Nova Zembla. The coast 
of the island was still little known; therefore the 
usual expediency of that day was followed. 
They kept close to the land and sailed until at 

50 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

last they should find some channel that would 
allow them to pass through into the next sea. 
They discovered no channel, but on the sixth of 
August the northern point of Nova Zembla, 
Cape Nassau, was reached. There was a great 
deal of ice, but after a few days open water ap- 
peared. 

The voyage was then continued. Their 
course then seemed easy. Following the east- 
ern coast downward they were bound to reach 
the Strait of Kara. Avoiding the Kara Sea, 
they made for the river Obi and hoped that all 
would be well. But before the ship had gone 
many days the cold weather of winter set in, 
and before the end of August the ship was sol- 
idly frozen into the ice. Many attempts were 
made to dig it out and push it into the open 
water. The men worked desperately; but the 
moment they had sawed a channel through the 
heavy ice to the open sea more ice-fields ap- 
peared, and they had to begin all over again. 
On the thirtieth of August a particularly heavy 
frost finally lifted the little wooden ship clear 
out of the ice. Then came a few days of thaw, 

5.1 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

during which they hoped to get the vessel back 
into shape and into the water. But the next 
night there was a repetition of the terrible 
creakings. The ship groaned as if it were in 
great agony, and all the men rushed on shore. 

The prospect of spending the winter in this 
desolate spot began to be more than an unspoken 
fear. Any night the vessel might be destroyed 
by the violent pressure of the ice. An experi- 
enced captain knew what to do in such circum- 
stances. All provisions were taken on shore, 
and the lifeboats were safely placed on the dry 
land. They would be necessary the next sum- 
mer to reach the continent. Another week 
passed, and the situation was as uncertain as be- 
fore. By the middle of September, however, 
all hope had to be given up. The expedition 
was condemned to spend the winter in the Arc- 
tic. The ship's carpenter became a man of im- 
portance. Near the small bay into which the 
vessel had been driven he found a favorable spot 
for a house. A little river near by provided 
fresh water. On the whole it was an advan- 
tageous spot for shipwrecked sailors, for a short 

52 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

distance towards the north there was a low 
promontory. The western winds had carried 
heavy trees and pieces of wood from the Si- 




berian coast, and this promontory had caught 
them. They were neatly frozen in the ice. 
All the men needed to do was to take these trees 
out of their cold storage and drag them ashore 
which, however, did not prove to be so easy a 
task as it sounds. There were only seventeen 
men on the ship, and two of them were too ill 
to do any work. The others were not familiar 
with the problem of how to saw and plane 
water-soaked and frozen logs into planks. Even 

53 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

when this had been done the wood must be 
hauled a considerable distance on home-made 
sleighs, clumsy affairs, and very heavy on the 
soft snow of the early winter. 

Unfortunately, after two weeks the carpenter 
of the expedition suddenly died. It was not easy 
to give him decent Christian burial. The 
ground was frozen so hard that spades and axes 
could not dig a grave; so the carpenter was 
reverently laid away in a small hollow cut in the 
solid ice and covered with snow. 

When their house was finished it did not 
offer many of the comforts of home, but it was 
a shelter against the ever-increasing cold. The 
roof offered the greatest difficulty to the inex- 
perienced builders. At last they hit upon a 
scheme that proved successful: they made a 
wooden framework across which they stretched 
one of the ship's sails. This they covered with a 
layer of sand. Then the good Lord deposited a 
thick coat of snow, which gradually froze and 
finally made an excellent cover for the small 
wooden cabin which was solemnly baptized 
"Safe Haven." There were no windows — fresh 

54 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

air had not yet been invented — and what was 
the use of windows after the sun had once disap- 
peared? There was one door, and a hole in the 
roof served as a chimney. To make a better 
draft for the fire of driftwood which was kept 
burning day and night in the middle of the cabin 
floor, a large empty barrel was used for a smoke- 




stack. Even then the room was full of smoke 
during all the many months of involuntary im- 
prisonment, and upon one occasion the lack of 
ventilation almost killed the entire expedition. 
While they were at work upon the house the 
men still spent the night on board their ship. 
When morning came, with their axes and saws 

SS 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

and planes they walked over to the house. But 
hardly a day went by without a disturbing visit 
from the much-dreaded polar bears. After 
some of the provisions had been removed from 




the ship to the house the bears became more in- 
sistent than ever. Upon one occasion when the 
bears had gone after a barrel of pickled meat, 
as shown with touching accuracy in the picture, 
the concerted action of three sailors was neces- 
sary to save the food from the savage beasts. 
Another time, when Heemskerk, De Veer, and 
one of the sailors were loading provisions upon 
a sleigh they were suddenly attacked by three 
huge bears. They had not brought their guns, 

5* 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

but they had two halberds, with which they hit 
the foremost bear upon the snout; and then they 
fled to the ship and climbed on board. The 
bears followed, sat down patiently, and laid siege 
to the ship. The three men on board were help- 
less. Finally one of them hit upon the idea of 
throwing a stick of kindling-wood at the bears. 
Like a well-trained dog, the animal that was 
struck chased the stick, played with it, and then 
came back to ask for further entertainment. At 
last all the kindlingwood laid strewn across the 
ice, and the bears had had enough of this sport. 
They made ready to storm the ship, but a lucky 
stroke with a halberd hit one of them so severely 
upon the sensitive tip of his nose that he turned 
around and fled. The others followed, and 
Heemskerk and his companions were saved. 

When the month of November came and the 
sun had disappeared, the bears also took their 
departure, rolled themselves up under some com- 
fortable shelter, and went to sleep for the rest 
of the winter. Now the sailors could wander 
about in peace, for the only other animal that 
kept awake all through the year was the polar 

57 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

fox. He was a shy beastie and never came near 
a human being. The sailors, however, hunted 
him as best they could. Not only did they 
need the skins for their winter garments, but 
stewed fox tasted remarkably like the domestic 
rabbit and was an agreeable change fom the 
dreary diet of salt-flesh. In Holland before the 
introduction of firearms rabbits were caught 
with a net. The same method was tried on 
Nova Zembla with the more subtle fox. Unfa- 
miliar with the wiles of man, he actually al- 
lowed himself to be caught quite easily. Later 
on traps were also built. But the method with 
the net was more popular, for the men had the 
greatest aversion to the fresh air of the freezing 
polar night and never left the house unless they 
were ordered to do some work. When they 
went hunting with the net they could pass the 
string that dropped the mechanism right under 
the door and stay inside, where it was warm and 
cheerful, and yet catch their fox. 

On the sixth of November the sun was seen 
for the last time. On the seventh, when it was 
quite dark, the clock stopped suddenly in the 

58 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

middle of the night, and when the men got up 
in the morning they had lost the exact time. For 
the rest of the winter they were obliged to guess 
at the approximate hour; not that it mattered so 
very much, for life had become an endless night: 
one went to bed and got up through the force of 
habit acquired by thousands of previous genera- 
tions. If the men had not been obliged to, they 
never would have left their comfortable beds. 
They had but one idea, to keep warm. The 
complaint about the insufferable cold is the main 
motive in this Arctic symphony. Lack of reg- 
ular exercise was chiefly to blame for this "freez- 
ing feeling" — lack of exercise and the proper 
underwear. It is true that the men dressed in 
many layers of heavy skins, but their lower gar- 
ments, which nowadays play a great part in the 
life of modern explorers, were sadly neglected. 
In the beginning they washed their shirts regu- 
larly, but they found it impossible to dry them ; 
for just as soon as the shirt was taken out of the 
hot water it froze stiff. When they carried the 
frozen garment into the house to thaw it out be- 
fore the fire it was either singed and burned in 

59 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 




spots or it refused absolutely to melt back into 
the shape and aspect of a proper shirt. Finally 
the washing was given up, as it has been on 
many an expedition, for cleanliness is a costly 
and complicated luxury when one is away from 
the beaten track of civilization. 

The walls of the house had been tarred and 
calked like a ship. All the same, when the first 
blizzards occurred, the snow blew through many 
cracks, and every morning the men were cov- 

60 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

ered with a coat of snow and ice. Hot-water 
bottles had not yet been invented, but at night 
large stones were roasted in the fire until they 
were hot, and then were placed in the bunks 
between the fur covers. They helped to keep 
the men warm, and incidentally they burned 
their toes before they knew it. Not only did the 
men suffer in this way. That same clock which 
I have already mentioned at last succumbed to 
the strain of alternating spells of heat and cold. 
It began to go slower and slower. To keep it 
going at all, the weight was increased every few 
days. At last, however, a millstone could not 
have coaxed another second out of the poor 
mechanism. From that moment on an hour- 
glass was used. One of the men had to watch 
it, and turn it over every sixty minutes. 

All this time, while the men never ceased their 
complaint about feeling cold, the heating prob- 
lem had been solved by fires made of such kin- 
dling-wood as the thoughtful ocean had carried 
across from the Siberian coast and deposited 
upon the shore. Finally, however, in despair 
at ever feeling really warm again, if only for a 

61 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

short while, it was decided, as an extra treat, to 
have a coal fire. There was some coal on board 
the ship, but it had been saved for use upon the 
homeward trip in the spring, when the men 
would be obliged to travel in open boats. The 
coal was brought to the house. The worst 
cracks in the walls were carefully filled with tar 
and rope, and somebody climbed to the roof and 
closed the chimney; not an ounce of the valu- 
able heat must be lost. As a result the men felt 
comfortable for the first time in many months; 
they also came very near losing their lives. 
Having dozed off in the pleasant heat they had 
not noticed that their cabin was filling with 
coal-gas until finally some of them, feeling un- 
comfortable, tried to get up, grew dizzy, and 
fainted. Our friend the barber, possessed of 
more strength than any of the others, managed 
to creep to the door. He kicked it open and let 
in the fresh air. The men were soon revived, 
and the captain treated them all to a glass of 
wine to celebrate the happy escape. No further 
experiments with coal were made during that 
year. 

62 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

December was a month of steady blizzards. 
The snow outside piled up in huge drifts which 
soon reached to the roof. The hungry foxes, 
attracted by the smell of cookery wafted abroad 
through the barrel-chimney, used to gallop across 
the roof, and at night their dismal and mean lit- 
tle bark kept the men in their bunks awake. 
At the same time their close proximity made 
trapping easier, and the skins were now doubly 
welcome; for the shoes, bought in Holland, had 
been frozen so often and had been thawed out 
too near the fire so frequently that they were 
leaking like sieves and could no longer be worn. 
New shoes were cut out of wood and covered 
with fox-fur. They provided comfortable, 
though far from elegant, footwear. 

New Year's day was a dreary feast, for all the 
men thought of home and were melancholy and 
sad. Outside a terrible snow-storm raged. It 
continued for an entire week. No one dared to 
go outside to gather wood, fearing the wind and 
cold would kill them. In this extremity they 
were obliged to burn some of their home-made 
furniture. On the fifth of January the blizzard 

63 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

stopped. The door was opened, the cabin was 
put in order, wood was brought from the wood- 
pile, and then one of the men suddenly remem- 
bered the date and how at home the feast of the 
Magi was being celebrated with many happy 
and innocent pastimes. The barber decided to 
organize a little feast. The first officer was 
elected to be "King of Nova Zembla." He was 
crowned with due solemnity. A special dinner 
of hot pancakes and rusks soaked in wine was 
served, and the evening was such a success that 
many imagined themselves safely home in their 
beloved fatherland. A new blizzard reminded 
them that they were still citizens of an Arctic 
island. 

On the sixteenth of January, however, the men 
who had been sent out to look after the traps and 
bring in wood suddenly noticed a glimmer of red 
on the horizon. It was a sign of the returning 
sun. The dreary months of imprisonment were 
almost over. From that moment the heating 
problem became less difficult. On the contrary, 
the roof and the walls now began to leak, and 
the expedition had its first taste of the thaw 

64 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

which would be even more fatal than the cold 
weather had proved to be. As has been re- 
marked, these men had been leading a very un- 
healthy life. While it was still light outside 




they had sometimes played ball with the wooden 
knob of the flagpole of the ship, but since early 
November they had taken no exercise of any 
sort. A few minutes spent out of doors just long 
enough to kill the foxes in the traps was all the 
fresh air they ever got. Out of a barrel they had 
made themselves a bath-tub, and once a week 
every man in turn had climbed through the little 

65 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

square opening into that barrel (see the picture) 
to get steamed out. But this mode of living, 
combined with bad food, brought half a year be- 
fore from Holland, together with the large quan- 
tity of fox-meat, now caused a great deal of 
scurvy, and the scurvy caused more dangerous 
illness. Barendsz, the man upon whom they de- 
pended to find the way home, was already so 
weak that he could not move. He was kept near 
the fire on a pile of bearskins. On the twenty- 
sixth of January another man who had been ill 
for some time suddenly died. His comrades had 
done all they could to save him. They had 
cheered him with stories of home, but shortly 
after midnight of that day he gave up the ghost. 
Early the next morning he was buried near the 
carpenter. A chapter of the Bible was read, a 
psalm was sung, and his sorrowful companions 
went home to eat breakfast. 

None of the men were quite as strong as they 
had been. Among other things, they hated the 
eternal bother of keeping the entrance to the door 
clear of snow. Why should they not abolish the 
door, and like good Eskimos enter and leave 

66 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

their dwelling-place through the chimney? 
Heemskerk wanted to try this new scheme and 
he got ready to push himself through the narrow 
barrel. At the same time one of the men rushed 
to the door to go out into the open and welcome 
the skipper when he should stick his head 
through the barrel ; but before he espied the emi- 
nent leader of the expedition he was struck by 
another sight: the sun had appeared above the 
horizon. Apparently Barendsz, who had tried 
to figure out the day and week of the year after 
they had lost count of the calendar, had been 
wrong in his calculation. According to him, 
there were to be two weeks more of darkness. 
And now, behold! there was the shining orb, 
speedily followed by a matutinal bear. The 
lean animal was at once killed and used to re- 
plenish the oil of the odorous little lamp which 
for more than three months had provided the 
only light inside the cabin. 

February came and went, but as yet there were 
no signs of the breaking up of the ice. During 
the first day of March a little open water was 
seen in the distance, but it was too far away to 

67 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

be of any value to the ship. An attempt was 
made to push the ship out of its heavy coat of 
ice, but the men at once complained that they 
were too weak to do much work. Some of them 
had had their toes frozen and could not walk. 
Others suffered from frost-bite on their hands 
and fingers and were unable to hold an ax. 
When they went outside only incessant vigilance 
saved them from the claws of the skinny bears 
that were ready to make up for the long winter's 
fast. Once a bear almost ate the commander, 
who was just able to jump inside the house and 
slam the door on bruin's nose. Another time a 
bear climbed on the roof, and when he could 
not get into the chimney, he got hold of the 
barrel and rocked that architectural contrivance 
until he almost ruined the entire house. It was 
very spooky, for the attack took place in the 
middle of the night, and it was impossible to 
go out and shoot the monster. 

March passed, and the ship, which had been 
seventy yards away from the water when it was 
deserted in the autumn of 1595, was now more 
than five hundred yards away from the open sea. 

68 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

The intervening distance was a huge mass of 
broken ice and snow-drifts. It seemed impos- 
sible to drag the boats quite so far. When on 
the first of May the last morsel of salt meat had 
been eaten, the men appeared to be as far away 
from salvation as ever. There was a general de- 




mand that something be done. They had had 
enough of one winter in the Arctic, and would 
rather risk a voyage in an open boat than another 
six months of cold bunks and tough fox-stew, and 
reading their Bible by the light of a single oil- 
lamp. 

69 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Fortunately — and this is a great compliment 
to a dozen men who have been cooped up in a 
small cabin for six months of dark and cold — 
the spirit of the sailors had been excellent, and 
discipline had been well maintained. They did 
not make any direct demands upon the captain. 
The question of going or staying they discussed 
first of all with the sick Barendsz, and he in turn 
mentioned it to Heemskerk. Heemskerk him- 
self was in favor of waiting a short while. He 
reasoned that the ice might melt soon, and then 
the ship could be saved. He, as captain, was 
responsible for his craft. He asked that they 
wait two weeks more. If the condition of the 
ice was still unsatisfactory at the end of that time, 
they would give up the ship and try to reach 
home in the boats. Meanwhile the men could 
get ready for the trip. They set to work at once 
cleaning and repairing their fur coats, sharpen- 
ing their tools, and covering their shoes with new 
skins to keep their feet from freezing during the 
long weeks in the open boats. 

An eastern storm on the last day of May filled 
their little harbor with more ice, and all hope of 

70 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

saving the ship was given up. The return trip 
must be made in the open boats. There were 
two, a large and a small one. They had been 
left on land in the autumn, and were now cov- 
ered with many feet of frozen snow. A first at- 
tempt to dig them out failed. The men were 
so weak that they could not handle their axes 
and spades. The inevitable bear attacked them, 
drove them post-haste back to the safe shelter of 
the house, and so put an end to the first day's 
work. 

The next morning the men went back to their 
work. Regular exercise and fresh air soon gave 
them greater strength, while the dire warning 
of Heemskerk that, unless they succeeded, they 
would be obliged to end their days as citizens of 
Nova Zembla provided an excellent spur to their 
digging enthusiasm. The two boats were at 
last dragged to the house to be repaired. They 
were in very bad condition, but since there was 
no further reason for saving the ship there was 
sufficient wood with which to make good the 
damage. From early to late the men worked, 
the only interruptions being the dinner-hour and 

7i 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

the visits of the bears. "But," as De Veer re- 
marked in his pleasant way, "these animals 
probably knew that we were to leave very soon, 
and they wanted to have a taste of us before we 
should have gone for good." Before that happy 
hour arrived the expedition was threatened with 
a novel, but painful, visitation. To vary the 
monotonous diet of bearsteak, the men had fried 
the liver. Three of them had eaten of this dish 
and fell so ill that all hope was given up of sav- 
ing their lives. The others, who knew that they 
could not handle the boats if three more sailors 
were to die, waited in great anxiety. For- 
tunately on the fourth day the patients showed 
signs of improvement and finally recovered. 
There were no further experiments with 
scrambled bear's liver. 

After that the work on the two boats pro- 
ceeded with speed, and by the twelfth of June 
everything was ready. The boats, now rein- 
forced for the long trip across the open water 
of the Arctic Ocean, had to be hauled to the sea, 
and the ever-shifting wind had once more put 
a high ice-bank between the open water and the 

72 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 



shore. A channel was cut through the ice with 
great difficulty, for there were no tools for this 
work. After two days more the survivors of 
this memorable shipwreck were ready for the 




last part of their voyage. Before they left the 
house Barendsz wrote three letters in which he 
recounted the adventures of the expedition. 
One of these letters was placed in a powder-horn 
which was left hanging in the chimney, where 
it was found two hundred and fifty years later. 
On the morning of the fourteenth, Barendsz 
and another sick sailor who could no longer walk 
were carried to the boats. With a favorable 

73 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

wind from the south they set sail for the northern 
cape of Nova Zembla, which was soon reached. 
Then they turned westward, and followed the 
coast until they should reach the Siberian conti- 
nent. The voyage along the coast was both 




difficult and dangerous. The two boats were 
not quite as large as the life-boats of a modern 
liner. Being still too weak to row, the men 
were obliged to sail between huge icebergs, often 
being caught for hours in the midst of large 
ice-fields. Sometimes they had to drag the 
boats upon the ice while they hacked a channel 
to open water. After a week the condition of 
the ice forced them to pull the boats on shore 
and wait for several days before they could go 

74 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

any farther. Great and tender care was taken 
of the sick pilot and the dying sailor, but those 
nights spent in the open were hard on the suffer- 
ers. On the morning of the twentieth of June 
the sailor, whose name was Claes Andriesz, felt 
that his end was near. Barendsz, too, said he 
feared that he would not last much longer. His 
active mind kept at work until the last. De 
Veer, the barber, had drawn a map of the coast, 
and Barendsz offered suggestions. Capes and 
small islands off the coast were definitely located, 
placed in their correct geographical positions, 
and baptized with sound Dutch names. 

The end of Barendsz came very suddenly. 
Without a word of warning he turned his eyes 
toward heaven, sighed, and fell back dead. A 
few hours later he was followed by the faithful 
Claes. They were buried together. Sad at 
heart, the survivors now risked their lives upon 
the open sea. They had all the adventures not 
uncommon to such an expedition. The boats 
were in a rotten condition ; several times the 
masts broke, and most of the time the smaller 
boat was half full of water. The moment they 

75 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

reached land and tried to get some rest, there 
was a general attack by wild bears. And once 
a sudden break in a field of ice separated the 
boats from the provisions, which had just been 
unloaded. In their attempt to get these back 
several men broke through the ice. They 
caught cold, and on the fifth of July another 
sailor, a relative of Claes, who had died with 
Barendsz, had to be buried on shore. 

During all this misery we read of a fine ex- 
ample of faithful performance of duty and of 
devotion to the interest of one's employers. You 
will remember that this expedition had been sent 
out to reach China by the Northeast Passage 
and to establish commercial relations with the 
merchants of the great heathen kingdom. For 
this purpose rich velvets and other materials 
agreeable to the eyes of Chinamen had been 
loaded onto the ship when they left Amsterdam. 
Heemskerk felt it his duty to save these goods, 
and he had managed to keep them in safety. 
Now that the sun shone with some warmth, the 
packages were opened and their contents dried. 
When Heemskerk came back to Amsterdam the 

76 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

materials were returned to their owners in good 
condition. 

On the eleventh of June of the year 1597 the 
boats were approaching the spot where upon pre- 
vious voyages large colonies of geese had been 
found. They went ashore and found so many 
eggs that they did not know how to take them 
all back to the boats. So two men took down 
their breeches, tied the lower part together with 
a piece of string, filled them with eggs, and car- 
ried their loot in triumph back to the others on 
board. 

That was almost their last adventure with 
polar fauna, except for an attack by infuriated 
seals whose quiet they had disturbed. The seals 
almost upset one of the boats. The men had no 
further difficulties, however. On the contrary, 
from now on everything was plain sailing; and 
it actually seemed to them that the good Lord 
himself had taken pity upon them after their 
long and patient suffering, for whenever they 
came to a large ice-field it would suddenly sepa- 
rate and make a clear channel for their boats; 
and when they were hungry they found that the 

77 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

small islands were covered with birds that were 

so tame that they waited to be caught and killed. 

At last, on the twenty-seventh of July, they 

arrived in open water where they discovered a 




strong eastern current. They decided that they 
must be near Kara Strait. The next morning 
they hoped to find out for certain. When the 
next morning came they suddenly beheld two 
strange vessels near their own boats. They were 
fishing-smacks, to judge by their shape and size, 
but nothing was known about their nationality, 
for they flew no flags, and it was well to be care- 
ful in the year of grace 1597. Therefore a care- 
ful approach was made. To Heemskerk's great 

78 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

joy, the ships were manned by Russians who 
had seen the fleet of Linschoten several years be- 
fore and remembered some of the Hollanders. 
There were familiar faces on both sides, and this 
first glimpse of human beings did more to re- 
vive the courage of the men than the doubtful 
food which the Russians forced with great hos- 
pitality upon their unexpected guests. The fol- 
lowing day the two fishing-boats set sail for the 
west, and Heemskerk followed in their wake. 
But in the afternoon they sailed into a heavy fog 
and when it lifted no further trace of the Rus- 
sians could be found. Once more the two small 
boats were alone, with lots of water around them 
and little hope before them. 

By this time all of the men had been attacked 
by scurvy and they could no longer eat hard- 
tack, which was the only food left on board. 
Divine interference again saved them. They 
found a small island covered with scurvy-grass 
(Cochlearia officinalis) the traditional remedy 
for this painful affliction. Within a few days 
they all recovered, and could row across the 
current of the straits which separated them from 

79 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

the continent. Here they found another Rus- 
sian ship. Then they discovered that their com- 
pass, on account of the proximity of heavy chests 
and boxes covered with iron rings, had lost all 
track of the magnetic pole and that they were 
much farther toward the east than they had sup- 
posed. They deliberated whether they should 
continue their voyage on land or on sea. Fi- 
nally they decided to stick to their boats and 
their cargo. Once more they closely followed 
the coast until they came to the mouth of the 
White Sea. That meant a vast stretch of dan- 
gerous open water, which must be crossed at 
great risk. The first attempt to reach the other 
shore failed. The two boats lost sight of each 
other, and they all worried about the fate of 
their comrades. On the eighteenth of August 
the second boat managed to reach the Kola pen- 
insula after rowing for more than thirty hours. 
That virtually ends the adventures of the men 
who had gone out with Barendsz and Heems- 
kerk to discover the Northeast Passage, and who 
quite involuntarily acted as the first polar ex- 
plorers. After a few days the boats found each 

80 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

other, and together they reached the first Rus- 
sian settlement, where they found houses and 
warm rooms and a chance to get a decent bath 
and eat from a table. Their misery was at once 
forgotten. At heart they were healthy-minded, 
simple fellows, and when for the first time after 
many months they saw some women they were 
quite happy, although these women were Lap- 
landers and proverbially lacking in those attri- 
butes which we usually connect with the idea of 
lovely womanhood. 

News traveled fast even in the dominion of 
the Lapp. In less than eighty hours a Lap- 
lander came running to the Russian settlement 
with a letter which had been written by De Ryp, 
who, half a year before, had been blown into the 
White Sea and was now waiting for a favorable 
wind to sail home. He was still in Kola, and 
was delighted at the safe return of his colleague 
from whom he had separated over a point of 
nautical difference. He invited the men to go 
home with him. The two small boats of Heems- 
kerk's ship were left in the town of Kola as a 
small souvenir for the kind-hearted Russians, 

Si 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 




the Arctic costumes were carefully packed away, 
to be shown to the family at home, and on the 
sixth of October they all said farewell to the 
Russian coast. Twenty-three days later they en- 
tered the Maas. By way of Maassluis, Delft, 
The Hague, and Haarlem they made their tri- 
umphant entry into Amsterdam. Dressed in 
their fox-skins and their home-made wooden 
shoes, they paraded through the streets of the 
city. Their High and Mightinesses the mayors 
received them at the town hall, and the world 
was full of the fame of this first Arctic expedi- 

82 



THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE 

tion. As for the practical results, there were 
none, unless we except the negative informa- 
tion about the impossibility of the North- 
eastern Passage. But nobody cared any longer 
about this route, for just two months be- 
fore the first Dutch fleet which had tried 
to reach the Indies by way of the Cape 
had safely returned to the roads of Texel. The 
Portuguese, after all, had proved to be not so 
dangerous as had been expected. The Indian 
native was quite willing to welcome the Dutch 




/ J 3-gg&5 : ^^ -Sggfeg 



83 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

trader. And the Northeastern route, after the 
wonderful failures of a number of conscientious 
expeditions, was given up for the well-worn and 
well-known route along the African coast. The 
Arctic was all right for the purpose of hunting 
of the profitable whale, but as a short cut to the 
Indies it had proved an absolute disappoint- 
ment. 



8 4 



THE TRAGEDY OF SPITZBERGEN 



CHAPTER III 
THE TRAGEDY OF SPITZBERGEN 

BEFORE I tell you the story of the first 
voyage to India I want to give a short 
account of another Dutch expedition 
in the Arctic Sea which ended even more sadly 
than that of Heemskerk and Barendsz. 

On their voyage to Nova Zembla the two 
mariners had discovered a group of islands 
which on account of their high mountains they 
had called the "Islands of the Steep Peaks," or 
Spitzbergen in the Dutch language. These is- 
lands provided an excellent center for the whal- 
ing fisheries. During the first half of the seven- 
teenth century a large Dutch fleet went north- 
ward every spring to catch whales. The dead 
animals were brought to Spitzbergen, where the 
blubber was turned into whale-oil, and the rest 
of the huge animal was got ready for a market 

87 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

that was not as finicky in its taste as in our own 
time. 

Soon a small city was built around the large 
furnaces and the rooming-houses for the work- 
men. This town was appropriately called 
"Greaseville" (in Dutch, Smeerenburg). It 
consisted of the usual gathering of saloons, eat- 
ing-places, and small stores, that you might find 
in a Western American town during a mining 
boom. When the autumn came, the inhabitants 
moved back to Holland and left the city to the 
tender mercies of the bears and foxes. Unfor- 
tunately, the owners of this curious and some- 
what motley settlement were not always the first 
to arrive upon the scene in the summer. Other 
sailors, Scotch or Norwegian, had often visited 
Greaseville before they arrived and either ap- 
propriated what they wanted or destroyed what 
they could not carry away. As early as 1626 a 
plan was discussed of leaving a guard on the isl- 
and during the winter. The men could live 
comfortably in one of the houses and they could 
support themselves by hunting and fishing. It 
was not a bad idea, but Nova Zcmbla still 



THE TRAGEDY OF SPITZBERGEN 

spooked in people's heads, and nobody wanted 
to try a winter of darkness and cold such as had 
been just described by De Veer. But in the year 
1630 eight English sailors were accidentally left 
behind from a ship, and next spring they were 
found little the worse for wear. As a result the 
experiment was at last made in the winter of the 
year 1633. Seven men were left on Spitzbergen 
and seven others on the Jan Mayen, an island 
somewhat to the west and farther away from the 
pole. The seven on Jan Mayen all died of 
scurvy. When next spring a fleet came to re- 
lieve them they were found frozen dead in their 
bunks. On Spitzbergen, however, all the men 
had passed a comfortable winter. They had suf- 
fered a good deal from the cold, but they had 
managed to keep out in the open, take a lot of 
exercise, and pass the long winter as cheerfully 
as the heavy blizzards and storms allowed. It 
was decided to leave a small guard upon the 
island every year. When in September of 1634 
the fleet of whalers sailed back for Holland, 
seven new men, under the leadership of Adriaen 
Janzzoon, who came from Delft, had agreed to 

89 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

remain behind and keep watch over the little 
settlement of Smeerenburg. They were well 
provided with supplies, but all perished before 
the spring of the next year. They left a diary, 
and from this we copy a few items to show the 
quiet and resigned courage with which they went 
to their death. 

"On the eleventh of September of the year of 
our Lord 1634 the whaling ships sailed for home. 
We wished them a happy voyage. We saw sev- 
eral whales and often tried to get one, but we did 
not succeed. We looked for fresh vegetables, 
foxes, and bears with great industry, but we did 
not find any. 

"Between the twentieth and the twenty-first of 
October the sun left us. On the twenty-fourth 
of November we began to suffer from scurvy. 
Therefore we looked for fresh vegetables, foxes, 
and bears with great industry, but we did not 
succeed, to our great grief. Therefore we con- 
soled each other that the good Lord would pro- 
vide. On the second of December Klaes Florisz 
took a remedy against scurvy, and we set traps 
to catch foxes. 

90 



THE TRAGEDY OF SPITZBERGEN 

"On the eleventh of December Jeroen Caroen 
also took a remedy against scurvy, and we all be- 
gan to eat separately from each other because 
some suffered more from scurvy and others less. 
We looked every day, trying to find fresh vege- 
tables, but we found nothing. So we recom- 
mended our souls into the hands of God. 

"On the twelfth of December Cornells Thysz 
took a remedy for scurvy. On the twenty-third 
of December we saw our first bear. Just as the 
cook was pouring out hot water from his kitchen 
the bear stood outside the window, but when he 
heard a noise he hastily fled. On the twenty- 
fourth we again heard a bear, and we at once ran 
for him with three men, whereupon he stood up- 
right on his hind legs and looked quite horrible ; 
but we shot a musket-ball through his belly, and 
he began to groan and bleed quite badly, and 
with his teeth he bit one of our halberds to pieces 
and then fled. We followed him with two lan- 
terns, but we could not get him, although we 
needed him sorely on account of the sick people 
as well as of those who were still well, for no- 
body was quite without pain. If things do not 

9i 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

improve before long we shall all be dead before 
the ships come back; but God knows what is 
best for us. On the twenty-fifth of December 
Cornelis Thysz took a remedy for scurvy for the 
second time, for things were going badly with 
him. On the fourteenth of January Adriaen 
Janszoon died, being the first of the seven of us 
to go; but we are now all very ill and have 
much pain. 

"On the fifteenth Fetje Otjes died. 

"On the seventeenth Cornelis Thysz died. 
Next to God we had put our hope upon him. 
We who were still alive made coffins for the 
three dead ones, and we laid them into their cof- 
fins, although we were hardly strong enough to 
do this, and every day we are getting worse. 

"On the twenty-eighth we saw the first fox, but 
we could not get him. On the twenty-ninth we 
killed our red dog, and we ate him in the eve- 
ning. On the seventh of February we caught 
our first fox, and we were all very happy; but 
it did not do us much good, for we are all too 
far gone by now. We saw many bears, yes, 
sometimes we saw as many as three, four, five, six, 

92 



THE TRAGEDY OF SPITZBERGEN 

ten, twelve at the same time ; but we did not have 
strength enough to fire a gun, and even if we 
had hit a bear, we could not have walked out 
to get him, for we are all so weak that we can 
not put one foot before the other. We can not 
even eat our bread; we have terrible pains all 
over our bodies; and the worse the weather is 
the more pain we have. Many of us are losing 
blood. Jeroan Caroen is the strongest, and he 
went out and got some coals to make a fire. 

"On the twenty-third we laid flat on our backs 
almost all the time. The end has come, and we 
commend our souls into the hands of God. 

"On the twenty-fourth we saw the sun again, 
for which we praised God, for we had not seen 
the sun since the twentieth or twenty-first of 
October of last year. 

"On the sixth of February the four of us who 
are still alive are lying in our bunks. We would 
eat something if only one of us were strong 
enough to get up and make a fire; we can not 
move from the pain we suffer. With folded 
hands we pray to God to deliver us from this 
sorrowful world. If it pleases Him we are 

93 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

ready; for we would prefer not to stand this suf- 
fering much longer without food and without a 
fire, and yet we cannot help each other, and each 
one must bear his own fate as well as he can." 

When the ships came to Spitzbergen in the 
spring of 1635 they found the cabin locked. A 
sailor climbed into the house through the attic 
window. The first things he found were pieces 
of the red dog hanging from the rafters, where 
they had been put to dry. In front of the stairs 
he stumbled over the frozen body of the other 
dog. Inside the cabin the seven sailors rested 
together. Three were lying in open coffins, two 
in one bunk, two others on a piece of sail on the 
floor, all of them frozen, with their knees pulled 
up to their chins. 

That was the last time an attempt was made to 
have anybody pass the winter on the island. 



94 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA- 
FAILURE 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA- 
FAILURE 

IT was no mean expedition which set sail for 
the Indies on the second of April of the 
year 1595 with four ships, 284 men, and 
an investment of more than three hundred 
thousand guilders. Amsterdam merchants had 
provided the capital and the ships. The Es- 
tates of Holland and a number of cities in the 
same province had sent cannon. With large 
cannon and small harquebus, sixty-four in num- 
ber, they were a fair match for any Spaniard 
or Portuguese who might wish to defend his 
ancient rights upon this royal Indian route, 
which ran down the Atlantic, doubled the Cape 
of Good Hope, and then made a straight line 
from the southernmost tip of Africa to Cape 
Comorin on the Indian peninsula in Asia. 

97 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

A few words should be said about the ships, 
for each was to experience adventures before 
reaching the safe harbor of home or disappear- 
ing silently in a lonely sea. There were the 
Hollandia, proudly called after the newly cre- 
ated sovereign republic of the seven united 
Netherlands; the Mauritius, bearing the name 
of the eminent general whose scientific strategy 
was forcing the Spanish intruder from one 
province after the other; the Amsterdam, the 
representative of a city which in herself was a 
mighty commonwealth; and lastly a small and 
fast ship called the Pigeon. 

Also, since there were four ships, there were 
four captains, and thereby hangs a tale. This 
new Dutch Republic was a democracy of an 
unusually jealous variety, which is saying a 
great deal. Its form of government was or- 
ganized disorder. The principle of divided 
power and governmental wheels within wheels 
at home was maintained in a foreign ex- 
pedition where a single autocratic head was 
a most imperative necessity. What happened 
during the voyage was this: the four captains 

98 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

mutually distrustful, each followed his own 
obstinate will. They quarreled among them- 
selves, they quarreled with the four civil direc- 
tors who represented the owners and the 
capitalists in Holland, and who together with 
the captains were supposed to form a legislative 
and executive council for all the daily affairs 
of the long voyage. Finally they quarreled 
with the chief representative of the commercial 
interests, Cornells de Houtman, a cunning 
trader and commercial diplomatist who had 
spent four years in Lisbon trying to discover 
the secrets of Indian navigation. Indeed, so 
great had been his zeal to get hold of the in- 
formation hidden in the heads of Portuguese 
pilots and the cabalistic meaning of Portuguese 
charts, that the authorities, distrustful of this 
too generous foreigner, with his ever-ready 
purse, had at last clapped him into jail. 

Then there had been a busy correspondence 
with the distant employers of this distinguished 
foreign gentleman. Amsterdam needed Hout- 
man and his knowledge of the Indian route. 
The money which in the rotten state of Portu- 

99 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

gal could open the doors of palaces as well as 
those of prisons brought the indiscreet pioneer 
safely back to his fatherland. Now, after an- 
other year, he was appointed to be the lead- 
ing spirit of a powerful small fleet and the hon- 
orable chairman of a complicated and unruly 
council of captains and civilian directors. 
That is to say, he might have been their real 
leader if he had possessed the necessary ability; 
but the task was too much for him. For not 
only was he obliged to keep the peace between 
his many subordinate commanders, but he was 
also obliged to control the collection of most 
undesirable elements who made up the crews 
of this memorable expedition. I am sorry that 
I have to say this, but in the year 1595 people 
did not venture upon a phantastical voyage to 
an unknown land along a highly perilous route 
unless there was some good reason why they 
should leave their comfortable native shores. 
The commanders of the ships and their chief 
officers were first class sailors. The lower 
grades, too, were filled with a fairly sober 
crowd of men, but the common sailor almost 

100 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

without exception belonged to a class of worth- 
less youngsters who left their country for their 
country's good and for the lasting benefit of 
their family's reputation. There was, how- 
ever, a saving grace, and we must give the devil 
his due. Many of these men were desperately 
brave. When they were well commanded they 
made admirable sailors and excellent soldiers, 
but the moment discipline was relaxed, they 
ran amuck, killed their officers or left them be- 
hind on uninhabited islands and lived upon the 
fat of the commissary department until the last 
bottle of gin was emptied and the last ham was 
eaten. In most cases their ship then ran on a 
hidden cliff, whereupon the democratic sea set- 
tled all further troubles with the help of the 
ever-industrious shark. 

When we realize that the Dutch colonial em- 
pire was conquered with and by such men we 
gain a mighty respect for the leaders whose 
power of will turned these wild bands of ad- 
venturers into valiant soldiers. And when we 
study the history of our early colonial system we 
no longer wonder that it was so bad. We are 

IOI 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

gratefully astonished that it was not vastly 
worse. 

On the tenth of March of the year 1595 the 
crews had been mustered, the last provisions 
had been taken on board. Everything was 
ready for the departure. The riot act was read 
to the men, for discipline was maintained by 
means of the gallows and the flogging-pole, and 
after a great deal of gunpowder had been 
wasted upon salutes the ships sailed to the 
Texel. Here they waited in the roads for two 
weeks, and then with a favorable wind from 
the north set sail for the English Channel. All 
this and the rest of the story which is to follow 
we have copied from the diary of Frank van 
der Does, who was on board the Hollandia and 
who was one of the few officers who got safely 
home. 

During the first three weeks it was plain sail- 
ing. On the twenty-sixth of April the fleet 
reached one of the Cape Verde Islands. Some 
of the wild goats of the islands that had so greatly 
impressed Linschoten were caught and divided 
among the sailors, making a very welcome 

102 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

change in their eternal diet of salted meat. An- 
other week went by, and two Portuguese freight- 
ers, loaded to the gunwales, appeared upon the 
horizon. Kindly remember that this was only 
a few years after the desperate struggle with 
Spain and while yet any ship that might 
be considered popish was a welcome prize. 
Therefore the instinct of all the Hollanders on 
board demanded that this easy booty be cap- 
tured. These ships, so the men reasoned, 
would provide more profit than an endless, 
dreary trip to an unknown Indian sea; but for 
once discipline prevailed. The commanders 
were under strict order not to do any freeboot- 
ing on their own account. On the contrary, 
they must make friends wherever they could. 
Accordingly, the Dutch admiral gave the Por- 
tuguese a couple of hams, and the Portuguese 
returned the favor with a few jars of preserved 
fruit. Then the two squadrons separated, and 
the Dutch fleet went southward. 

In the end of June the ships passed the 
equator, and scurvy made its customary appear- 
ance among the men. The suspicion that 

103 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

scurvy might have something to do with the 
lack of certain elements in the daily food had 
begun to dawn upon the sailors of that time. 
Of course it was quite impossible for them to 
carry fresh solid food in their little and ill- 
ventilated ships, but they could take fluids. 
Water was never drunk by sailors of that day. 
It spoiled too easily in the primitive tanks. 
Beer was the customary beverage. This time, 
however, a large supply of wine had been taken 
along, and when they reached the tropics each 
of the sailors got a pint of wine per day as a 
remedy or, rather, a preventive of the dreaded 
disease. But it increased rapidly, and with a 
feeling of deep relief the sailors welcomed the 
appearance of wild birds, which indicated that 
the Cape of Good Hope must be near. Early 
in August they sailed past the southern point of 
the African continent, and dropped anchor in a 
small bay near the spot where now the town of 
Port Elizabeth is situated. Here our friend 
Van der Does was sent on shore with two boats 
to find fresh water. His first attempt at a land- 
ing did not succeed. The boats got into a very 

104 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

heavy surf. They were attacked by a couple 
of playful whales, and on the shore excited 
natives, reputed to be cannibals, danced about 
in gleeful anticipation. A storm broke loose, 
and for almost an entire day the men floated 
helplessly on the angry waves. When at last 
they returned to the ship the other sailors had 
already given them up as lost. 

The next day the weather was more favora- 
ble, and they managed to reach the shore, where 
they made friends with the natives. Accord- 
ing to the description, these must have been 
Hottentots. They made a very bad impression. 
The Hottentot, then as now, was smallish and 
very ugly, with a lot of black hair that looked 
as if it had been singed. In short, in the lan- 
guage of the sixteenth century they looked like 
people who had been hanging on the gallows 
for a long time and had shriveled into the leath- 
ern caricature of a man. A dirty piece of skin 
served them as clothing, and their language 
sounded to the Dutch sailors like the cackling 
of a herd of angry turkeys. As for their man- 
ners, they were beastly. When they killed an 

105 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

animal, they ate it raw, both insides and out- 
sides. Perhaps they stopped long enough to 
scrape some of the dirt off with their fingers, 
but usually they did not take the trouble to cook 




their food. Furthermore — this, however, so 
far was only a suspicion — they were said to be 
cannibals and ate their own kind. 

The happy Hottentot still lived in the Stone 
Age, and these first European traders were a ver- 
itable godsend to a people obliged to hunt with 
stone arrows. The expedition did not fail to 
discover this, and for a few knives and a few 

106 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

simple iron objects they received all the cows 
and sheep they wanted. And, to our great joy, 
we get our first glimpse of that most amusing 
and clownish of all living creatures, the penguin. 
The penguin has risen in the social scale of wild 
birds since he has become one of the chief at- 
tractions of the moving-pictures. In the year 
1595 he was every bit as silly and absurd an ani- 
mal as he is now, when he wanders forth to make 
friends with the sailors of our South Polar ex- 
peditions. Van der Does hardly knew what to 
make of this strange creature which has wings, 
yet cannot fly, and whose feathers look like the 
smooth skin of a seal. Strangest of all, this wild 
animal was found to be so tame that the sailors 
had to box their ears before they could force a 
narrow path through the dense crowds of excited 
birds. 

On the eleventh of August the ships left the 
safe harbor. Their original plan had been to 
cross the Indian Ocean from this point and to 
make directly for the Indian islands, but there 
had been so much illness among the crew that 
the plan had to be given up. They decided to 

107 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

call at Madagascar first of all. There they 
hoped to find an abundance of fresh fruit and to 
spend some weeks in which to allow the sick peo- 
ple to recover completely before they ventured, 
into the actual domains of the Portuguese. 

Unfortunately, the navigating methods of that 
day were still very primitive. A profound trust 
in the Lord made up for a lack of knowledge of 
the compass. The good Lord in his infinite 
mercy usually guided the ship until it reached 
some shore or other. Then the navigator set to 
work and wormed his way either upward or 
downward until at last he struck the spot which 
he had been trying to reach all the time and 
thanked divine Providence for his luck. The 
particular bay renowned for its fresh water and 
vegetables, that the expedition hoped to reach 
was situated on the east coast of Madagascar, 
but a small gale blew the ships to the westward. 
They could not reach the southern cape, and 
they were forced to take whatever the western 
coast could provide. That was little enough. 
There was an abundance of wild natives. Upon 
one occasion the natives caught a landing party 

108 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 



and stripped them of all their arms and clothes 
before they allowed them to return to their ships. 
But there were no wild fruit-trees, and upon 
these now depended the lives of the members of 
the expedition. 

Seventy sailors were dead. Worst of all, the 
captain of the Hollandia, Jan Dignumsz by 




name, the most energetic of the leaders and fa- 
mous for his discipline, had also died. A small 
island was used as a cemetery, and was baptized 
Deadmen's Land, where rested one-quarter of 
the men who had left Holland. The situation 
was far from pleasant when the Pigeon, which 
had been sent out to reconnoiter, came back with 

109 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

good tidings. A tribe of natives had been found 
that was willing to enter into peaceful trade with 
the Hollanders and to sell their cattle in ex- 
change for knives and beads. It was almost too 
good to be true. For a single tin spoon these 
simple people would give an entire ox or four 
sheep. A steel knife induced them to offer one 
of their daughters as a slave. 

At this spot the sick people were landed, to 
be tended on shore. Soon the misery was for- 
gotten in the contemplation of an abundance of 
wild monkeys, which competed with the natives 
in the execution of wild and curious dances and 
which when roasted on hot coals made a fine 
dish. This idyl, however, did not last long. 
The "pious life" of the sailors and their attitude 
toward the natives soon caused considerable 
friction. One night the natives attacked the 
camp where the sick men slept. The Holland- 
ers, from their side, took four young natives 
to their ships and kept them there as prisoners. 
The four of course tried to escape. One was 
drowned, pulled down by his heavy chains. 
Two others hid themselves in a small boat and 

no 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

were recaptured the next day. A few days after 
this event the mate of one of the ships and 
another sailor went on shore and tried to buy a 
cow. They were attacked. The sailor was 
mortally wounded, and the mate had his throat 
cut. In revenge the Hollanders shot one of the 
natives and burned down a few villages. It is a 
sad story, but we shall often have to tell of this 
sort of thing when the white man made his first 
appearance among his fellow-creatures of a dif- 
ferent hue. 

After this adventure the council of captains 
decided to proceed upon the voyage without fur- 
ther delay. On the thirteenth of December the 
fleet started upon the last stretch of water which 
separated it from the island of Java. After two 
weeks, however, scurvy once more played such 
havoc among the sailors that the ships were 
obliged to sail back to Madagascar. They 
found the small island called Santa Maria on 
the east coast. The natives here were more 
civilized, there was an abundance of fresh food, 
and the sick people recovered in a short time. 
Except for a sufficient supply of water, the ex- 

iii 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

pedition was ready for the last thousand miles 
across the Indian Ocean. Santa Maria, how- 
ever, did not provide enough water. 

Once more a sloop was sent out to reconnoiter. 
In the Bay of Saint Antongil, on the main island, 
they discovered a small river, and on the twenty- 
fifth of January the four ships reached this bay. 
They started filling their water-kegs when on the 
third of February a terrible storm drove the 
Hollandia on a shoal and almost wrecked the 
ship. During the attempts at getting her afloat 
two of her boats were swept away and were 
washed on shore. The next morning a sloop 
was sent after these boats, but during the night 
the natives, in their desire for iron nails, had 
hacked the boats to pieces. When thereupon 
the boat with sailors approached the village, the 
natives, expecting a punitive expedition, at- 
tacked the men with stones. The Hollanders 
fired their muskets, the power of which seemed 
unknown to these people, for they gazed at the 
murderous arms with great curiosity until a 
number of them had been killed, when they ran 
away and hid themselves. After the fashion of 

112 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

that day the Dutch crew then burned down a 
few hundred native huts. Such was the end of 
the first visit of Hollanders to Madagascar. 
On the thirteenth of February the ships left for 
the Indies, but before they got so far the long- 
expected internal disorder had broken loose. 

I have mentioned that the captain of the Hol- 
landia had died on the west coast of Madagas- 
car. The owners of the ships, not wishing to 
leave anything to luck, had provided each ship 
with sealed instruction, telling the officers who 
should succeed whom in case of just such an ac- 
cident. These letters were to be opened in the 
full council of captains. Instead of doing this, 
the civil commissioner on the Hollandia had 
opened his letter at once and had read therein 
that the office of captain should be bestowed up- 
on the first mate, De Keyser by name, and a per- 
sonal friend of the commissioner. It is difficult 
at this late date to discover what caused all the 
trouble which followed. De Keyser was a good 
man, the most popular officer of the fleet, while 
Houtman, the civilian commander of the expedi- 
tion, was very much disliked by the officers of 

113 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

all the ships. There is nothing very peculiar in 
this. Civilians are never wanted on board a 
fleet, least of all when they have been sent out 
to control the actions of the regular seafaring 
people. It is not surprising, therefore, to find 
the officers taking the side of De Keyser and 
turning against the civilians. Houtman in his 
high official altitude and in a very tactless way, 
declared that he would not recognize De Key- 
ser. De Keyser, to avoid friction, then declared 
that he would voluntarily resign, but the other 
officers declared that they would not hear of 
such a thing. Thereupon Houtman insisted 
that he, as civilian commander, had a right to 
demand the strictest obedience to the orders of 
the owners. The officers told Houtman what 
they would be before they obeyed a mere civil- 
ian. Houtman stood his ground. The council 
of the captains broke up in a free-for-all fight, 
and the most violent backers of De Keyser de- 
clared that they would shoot Houtman rather 
than give in. Thus far the quarrel had been 
about the theoretical principle whether the ac- 
tual sailors or the civilian commissioners should 

114 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

be the masters of the fleet. But when the man 
who had started the whole trouble by opening 
the sealed letter against orders proposed to de- 
sert the fleet with the Hollandia he committed 
a breach of etiquette which at once made him 
lose the support of the other regular officers. 
Discipline was discipline. The mutineer was 
brought before a court-martial and was ordered 
to be put in irons until the end of the voyage. 
He actually made the remainder of the trip as a 
prisoner. The suit against him was not dropped 
until after the return to Holland. It was a 
storm in a tea-kettle, or, rather, it was a quarrel 
between a few dozen people, most of them ill, 
who were cooped up in four small and ill-smell- 
ing vessels and who had got terribly on one an- 
other's nerves. It is needless to say that these 
official disagreements greatly entertained the 
rough elements in the forecastle, who witnessed 
this commotion with hidden glee and decided 
that they would have some similar fun of their 
own as soon as possible. 

Meanwhile the wind had been favorable, and 
on the fifth of June, after a long, but uneventful 

"5 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

voyage, an island was seen. It proved to be a 
small island off the coast of Sumatra. Sumatra 
itself was reached two days later, and on the 
eleventh of the same month the Sunda Archi- 




pelago, between Sumatra and Java, was reached. 
In this part of the Indies the white man had been 
before. The natives, therefore, knew the power 
of firearms, and they were accordingly cautious. 
One of them who was familiar with the straits 
between the islands offered to act as pilot on 
their further trip to Bantam. For eight reals 
in gold he promised to guide them safely to the 

116 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

north shore of Java. The amount was small, 
but the distance was short. On the twenty-third 
of June of the year 1596 four Dutch ships ap- 
peared for the first time in the roads of Bantam, 
and were welcomed by the Portuguese with all 
the civility which the sight of sixty-four cannon 
demanded. At that time Bantam was an im- 
portant city, the most important trading center 
of the western part of the Indian islands. It 
was the capital of a Mohammedan sultan, and 
for many years it had been the residence of a 
large Portuguese colony. Besides Javanese na- 
tives and Portuguese settlers there were many 
Arab traders and Chinese merchants. All of 
these hastened forth to inspect the ships with the 
strange flag and have a look at this new delega- 
tion of white men who were blond, not dark like 
the Portuguese, and who spoke an unknown lan- 
guage. 

The fleet had now reached its destination, and 
the actual work of the commercial delegates be- 
gan. It was their business to conclude an offi- 
cial treaty with the native authorities and to try 
to obtain equal trading rights with the Portu- 

117 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

guese. Houtman was of great value in this sort 
of negotiation. As representative of the mighty 
Prince Maurice of Nassau, who for the benefit 
of the natives was described as the most high 
potentate of the most powerful Dutch common- 
wealth, he called upon the regent, who was gov- 
erning the country during the minority of the 
actual sultan. He made his visit in great state, 
and through a number of presents he gained the 
favor of the regent. On the first of July he ob- 
tained the desired commercial treaty. The Hol- 
landers were allowed to trade freely, and a house 
was put at their disposal to serve as a general of- 
fice and storeroom. Two of the civilian direc- 
tors were allowed to live on shore, and every- 
thing was ready for business. Thus far things 
had gone so well that Houtman decided to per- 
form his task leisurely. The new pepper har- 
vest was soon to be gathered, and he thought 
it well to wait until he had a chance to get fresh 
spices. What was left of last year's crop was 
offered for a very low price, but as there was no 
hurry, no supply was bought. 

Unfortunately, this time of waiting was uti- 
118 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

lized by the Portuguese for a campaign of 
underhand agitation against their unwelcome 
rivals. They did not accuse the Hollanders di- 
rectly of any evil intentions, but did the regent 
know who those people were? It is true that 
they claimed to be the representatives of a cer- 
tain Prince of Nassau. Was there such a 
Prince? They might just as well be common 
buccaneers. It would be much safer if the re- 
gent would order his soldiers to take all the 
Hollander people prisoner and to surrender 
them to the Portuguese, to be dealt with accord- 
ing to their deserts. 

The regent, who knew nothing about his new 
guests except that they were white and had come 
to him in wooden ships, listened with an atten- 
tive ear. At first he did not act, but the Hol- 
landers soon noticed that whereas they found it 
difficult to buy anything at all in Bantam, Portu- 
guese vessels left the harbor every week with 
heavy cargoes. At last when the commissary 
department of the Dutch fleet sent on shore for 
provisions they were refused all further supplies. 
Evidently something was going to happen. 

120 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

To be well prepared against all eventualities, 
the Dutch captains began to chart the harbor. 
With the small guns of that age it was necessary 
to know exactly how near shore one could get in 
order to bombard the enemy. The natives saw 
the maneuvering, and wondered what it was all 
about. From that moment on there was sus- 
picion on both sides, and at last the tension 
between them grew so serious that the Holland- 
ers decided to remove their goods from their 
storehouse and bring them on the ships. But 
while they were loading their possessions into 
the boats Houtman and another civilian by the 
name of Willem Lodewycksz were suddenly 
taken prisoner and brought to the castle of the 
regent. This dignitary, afraid of the Portu- 
guese, whose power he appreciated, and yet un- 
willing to act openly against some newcomers 
who might be far more dangerous, wanted to 
keep the leader of the Dutch expedition and one 
of his officers as hostages until the Dutch ships 
should have left the port without doing him or 
his people any harm. 

The Hollanders, however, who knew that the 
121 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 



Portuguese were responsible for this action, at 
once attacked the Portuguese ships. Both par- 
ties, however, proved to be equally strong, and 




having fired several volleys at one another, both 
sides gave up their quarrel and waited until they 
should be reinforced. Houtman and his com- 
panion were set free after the Hollanders had 
paid a heavy ransom. All this took place in the 
month of October. Even then Houtman hoped 
that the interrupted trading might be resumed. 
Meanwhile, however, the Portuguese had asked 
for reinforcements to be sent from their colony 

122 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

in Malacca, and a high Portuguese official was 
already on his way to Bantam to offer the regent 
ten thousand reals for the surrender of the entire 
Dutch fleet. Of these negotiations the Dutch 
commander obtained full details through a 
friendly Portuguese merchant. Since every- 
body spied upon everybody else, this merchant's 
secret correspondence was soon detected, and the 
culprit was sent to Malacca. As there was now 
no longer any hope for profitable business, the 
Dutch fleet made ready to depart. Just before 
leaving, however, they managed to get some 
cargo. A Chinaman got on board the admiral's 
ship, and made him the following offer. He 
would load two vessels with spices and would 
leave the port. The Hollanders would attack 
his vessels and would capture both ship and 
cargo. Of course they must pay cash and must 
deposit the money beforehand. 

This was done, and in this way Houtman got 
several thousand guilders' worth of nutmeg and 
mace. Thereupon the Hollanders left Bantam 
and tried their luck in several other cities on the 
Javanese coast; but everywhere the people had 

123 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

been warned by the Portuguese against ungodly 
pirates who were soon to come with four big 
ships, and everywhere the ships were refused 
water and were threatened with open hostilities 
if they should attempt to buy anything from the 
natives. 

One little king, however, appeared to have 
more friendly feelings. That was the King of 
Sidayu, on the strait of Surabaya. He was very 
obliging indeed, and volunteered to pay the first 
call upon his distinguished visitors. At the hour 
which had been officially announced his Maj- 
esty, with a large number of well-armed canoes, 
paddled out to the Dutch ships. The Holland- 
ers, glad at last to find so cheerful a welcome, 
had arranged everything for a festive occasion. 
The ships had hoisted their best array of flags, 
and the trumpeters — it was a time when signals 
on board were given with a trumpet — bellowed 
forth a welcome. The Amsterdam was the first 
ship to be reached. The captain stood ready at 
the gangway to welcome the dusky sovereign, 
but suddenly his ship was attacked from all sides 
by a horde of small brown men. They swarmed 

124 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

over the bulwarks and hacked a dozen Holland- 
ers to pieces before the others could defend them- 
selves. These in turn gave fight as best they 




could with knives and wooden bars, but many 
more were killed. At last, however, the other 
ships managed to come to the relief of the Am- 
sterdam, and they destroyed the fleet of war- 
canoes with a few volleys from their cannon. 
It was a sad business. Several of the officers 
had been killed. What with the illness of many 
of the men there were hardly sailors enough to 
man the four ships. The Amsterdam looked 

125 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

like a butcher shop. It was cleaned thoroughly, 
the dead people were given Christian burial in 
the open sea, and the voyage was continued to 
the island of Madura. 

Here they arrived on the eighth of December, 
and were once more met by a large fleet of small 
craft. In one of these there was a native who 
knew a little Portuguese. He asked to speak to 
the commander, who at that moment was on the 
Amsterdam. Houtman told the native inter- 
preter to row to the Mauritius, where he would 
join him in a few minutes. This was a good 
idea, for the people on the Amsterdam, who had 
just seen the massacre of their comrades, were 
very nervous and in no condition to receive an- 
other visit of natives, however friendly they in- 
tended to be. But through a mistake the boat 
of the interpreter did not turn toward the Mau- 
ritius, but returned once more to the Amsterdam, 
apparently to ask for further instructions. Then 
one of these horrible accidents due entirely to 
panic happened. The sailors of the Amsterdam 
opened fire upon the natives. The other ships 
thought that this was the sign for ? new general 

126 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

attack, and they got out their cannon. In a 
moment a score of well-intentioned natives, and 
among them their king, had been killed or were 
drowning. 

After this it could not be expected that the 
island of Madura would sell Houtman anything 
at all. There was only one chance left if the 
expedition was to be a financial success. This 
was a trip to the Molucca Islands. But for this 
voyage the ninety-four sailors who were still 
alive — all the others who had left Holland the 
year before were dead — hardly sufficed. Fur- 
thermore, the Amsterdam was beginning to show 
such severe leaks that the carpenters could not 
repair the damage. The ship was therefore 
beached and burned. The crew was divided 
among the three other ships and they set sail for 
the Moluccas. 

Before they reached these islands a formal 
mutiny had broken out on board the Mauritius. 
Suddenly, during the afternoon meal, the cap- 
tain of the ship had died. He had fainted, 
turned blue and black, and in less than an hour 
he was dead after suffering dreadful pains. 

127 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Healthy people, so the sailors whispered, did not 
die that way, and they accused Houtman, who 
did not like this particular captain, of having 
put poison into his food. Houtman was at- 
tacked by his own men, and he was put in irons. 
A formal tribunal then was called together. It 
investigated the charges, but nothing was found 
against the accused Commissioner. Therefore 
Houtman was released, and the topsyturvy ex- 
pedition once more continued its voyage. 

But it never reached the Molucca Islands, for 
before they got to these they found the island of 
Bali. This proved to be governed by a well- 
disposed monarch. The influence of the Port- 
uguese was less strong in this island than it 
had been on Java. The Hollanders, too, had 
learned their lesson, and they refrained from 
the naval swashbuckling that had often charac- 
terized their conduct on Java. On the contrary, 
they gave themselves every possible trouble to 
be very pleasant to his Majesty the Sultan. 
They made him fine presents, and they produced 
their maps of the fatherland and made a great 
ado about their official documents. The sultan 

128 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

wished to know who they were. They told him 
that they came from a country which was situated 
in the northern part of Europe, where the water 
turned into a solid mass across which you could 




drive a horse every winter. This country, ac- 
cording to their descriptions, covered a region 
occupied by Russia, France, and Germany. 
There was but little truth in these grandiloquent 
stories, but they were dealing with an innocent 
native who must be duly impressed by the great 
power and the enormous riches of the home of 
ninety-odd, bedraggled and much traveled 

129 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Dutch sailors. The account which the sailors 
gave of their country so deeply impressed the 
king that he allowed them to buy all the spices 
they wanted and to collect the necessary provi- 




sions for the long return voyage. On February 
26, in the second year of their voyage, the three 
ships got ready to sail back to Holland. One of 
the civilian directors who with his masterful fib- 
bing had brought himself more particularly to 
the attention of his Majesty was left behind, to- 
gether with one sailor. They were to act as 
counselors to the court, an office which they held 
for four years, when they returned to Amster- 
dam. Of the two hundred and eighty-four men 

130 



THE FIRST VOYAGE TO INDIA 

who had left Holland in 1595, only eighty-nine 
returned after an absence of two years and four 
months. 

That was the end of the first trip. It had not 
been profitable. The sale of the pepper and 
nutmeg bought in Bali saved the expedition from 
being a total loss to the investors, but there were 
not nearly such large revenues as were to follow 
in the succeeding years. Furthermore, Hout- 
man had not been able to establish any lasting 
relations with any of the native princes of India. 
Neither could he report that the first Dutch ex- 
pedition had been a shining example of tactful 
dealing with, or kind treatment of the people of 
the Indies. 

But this was really a detail. It was an un- 
fortunate incident due to their own lack of ex- 
perience and to the intrigues of the rival Port- 
uguese merchants. 

From a commercial point of view this expedi- 
tion was a failure. Yet it brought home a large 
volume of negative information which was of 
the utmost importance. It showed that the 
direct road to India was not an impossible 

131 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

achievement to anybody possessed of energy and 
courage. It showed that the power of the Port- 
uguese in India was not as strong as had been 
expected. It showed that the dream of an in- 
dependent colonial empire for the new Dutch 
Republic in the Indian islands was not an idle 
one. In short, it proved that all the fears and 
misgivings about Holland's share in the develop- 
ment of the riches of Asia had been unnecessary. 
The thing could be done. 



132 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA- 
SUCCESS 



CHAPTER V 

THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA- 
SUCCESS 

THERE was now a great boom in the 
Indian trade. Whosoever could beg, 
borrow, or steal a few thousand guild- 
ers ; whoever possessed an old scow which could 
perhaps be made to float, whoever was related 
to a man who had a cousin who had some in- 
fluence on the exchange, suddenly became an 
Indian trader, equipped a ship, hired sailors, had 
mysterious conferences with nautical gentlemen 
who talked about their great experience in for- 
eign waters, and then waited for the early days 
of spring to bid God-speed to his little expedi- 
tion. Every city must have its own Indian fleet. 
Companies were formed, stockholders quarreled 
about the apportionment of the necessary capi- 
tal, and at once they split up into other smaller 
companies. There was an "Old" Indian Trad- 

135 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

ing Company. The next day there was a rival 
called the "New" Indian Trading Company. 
There was an Indian company which was 
backed by the province of Zeeland. There was 
a private enterprise of the city of Rotterdam. 
To be honest, there were too many companies 
for the small size of the country. Before an- 
other dozen years had passed they were all 
amalgamated into one strong commercial body, 
the great Dutch East India Company, but dur- 
ing the first years hundreds of ships stampeded 
to the promised land of Java and Bali and the 
Moluccas, and for one fleet of small vessels 
which came home with a profit there were a 
dozen which either were shipwrecked on the 
way or which had ruined their shareholders be- 
fore they had passed the equator. 

Amsterdam, as always, was the leader in this 
activity. It was not only a question of capital. 
There had to be men of vision, merchants who 
were willing to do things on a large scale, be- 
fore such a venture could return any profit. 
And while the ships of the Zeeland Company 
were hurried to sea, and left long before the 

136 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA 

others, and incidentally came back a few years 
later, Amsterdam quietly collected eight hundred 
thousand guilders and advertised for competent 
officers and willing men for a large expedition. 
This time, it was decided, everything was to be 
done with scientific precision, and nothing must 
be left to chance. The commander in chief of 
the 560 men who were to take part in the expe- 
dition was Jacob van Neck, a man of good birth, 
excellent training, and well-known in the poli- 
tics of his own city. His most important adviser 
was Jacob van Heemskerk, fresh from his ad- 
ventures in the Arctic Sea and ready for new 
ones in the Indian Ocean. Several of the officers 
who had been to Bantam with Houtman were 
engaged for this second voyage. Among them 
our friend Van der Does, out of whose diary we 
copied the adventures of the first voyage to the 
Indies. Even the native element was not lack- 
ing. You will remember that the Hollanders 
had taken several hostages in Madagascar when 
they visited the east coast of that island in the 
year 1595. Two of these had been tamed and 
had been taken to Holland. After a year in 

137 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Amsterdam they were quite willing to exchange 
the uncomfortable gloominess of the Dutch cli- 
mate for a return to their sunny native shores. 
Also there was a Mohammedan boy by the 
name of Abdul, whom curiosity had driven 
from Bali to Holland on board the ship of 
Houtman. 

The fleet of eight vessels left the roads of Texel 
on the first of May of the year 1598, and with a 




favorable wind reached the Cape Verde Islands 
three weeks later. There, a general council of 
the different captains was asked to decide upon 

138 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA 

the further course. For with each expedition 
the knowledge of what ought to be done and 
what ought to be omitted increased, and the 
experiences of Houtman on the coast of Africa 
where his entire crew had been disabled through 
scurvy, must not be repeated. The fleet must 
either follow the coast of Africa to get fresh food 
and water whenever necessary, or the ships must 
risk a more western course, which would take 
them a far distance away from land, but would 
bring them into currents which would carry 
them to the Indies in a shorter while. They de- 
cided to take the western course. It was a very 
tedious voyage except for the flying-fishes which 
sometimes accompanied the ship. Luck was 
with the expedition, and on the ninth of July the 
ships passed the equator. The little island of 
Trinidad, off the coast of Brazil, was soon 
reached, and an inquisitive trip in an open boat 
to explore this huge rock almost ended in disas- 
ter. But such small affairs as a night spent in 
an open boat in a stormy ocean were all in the 
day's work and gave the sailors something to 
talk about. 

139 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Within a remarkably short time the lonely is- 
land of Tristan d'Acunha was passed, and from 
there the current and the western winds carried 
the ships to the Cape of Good Hope. But near 
this stormy promontory a small hurricane sud- 
denly fell upon the fleet, and after a night of 
very heavy squalls one of the eight ships had 
disappeared. It was never seen again. A few 
days later, this time through carelessness in ob- 
serving signals, four other ships were separated 
from their admiral. Several days were spent 
in coursing about in the attempt to find them. 
The sea, however, is very wide, and ships very 
small, and Van Neck with two big and one small 
vessel at last decided to continue the voyage 
alone. He was in a hurry. There were many 
rivals to his great undertaking, and when he ac- 
tually met a Dutch ship sent out by the province 
of Zeeland, he insisted that there must be no de- 
lay of any sort. The Zeeland ship, however, 
was not a dangerous competitor. Nine members 
of its crew of seventy-five had died. Among the 
others there was so much scurvy that only seven 
men were able to handle the helm. Only two 

140 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA 

could climb aloft. The Amsterdam ships ought 
to have helped their fellow-countrymen, but in 
the Indian spice trade it was a question of "first 




come, first served." Therefore they piously 
commended their Zeeland brethren to the care 
of the Good Lord and hastened on. 

A short stay in Madagascar was necessary be- 
cause the water in the tanks was of such abom- 
inable taste and smelled so badly that it must be 
replenished. The ships sailed to the east coast 
of the island, stopped at Santa Maria, well 
known from the visit of Houtman's ships three 
years before, and then made a short trip in search 

141 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

of fresh fruit to the bay of Antongil. On the 
island of Santa Maria they had found a happy 
population, well governed by an old king and 
spending their days in hunting wild animals on 
land or catching whales at sea. But in the Bay 
of Antongil things had greatly changed since 
Houtman had left a year before. There had 
been a war with some of the tribes from the in- 
terior of the island. The villages along the 
coast had been burned, and all the cattle had 
been killed. Men and women were dying of 
starvation. Right in the midst of the lovely 
tropical scenery there lay the decaying corpses 
of the natives, a prey to vultures and jackals. 
The expedition of Van Neck, however, had been 
sent out to buy spices in India and not to reform 
the heathen inhabitants of African islands. The 
water-tanks were hastily filled, and on the six- 
teenth of September the island was left to its 
own fate. 

For two months the ships sailed eastward. 
There were a few sick men on board, but no- 
body died, which was considered a magnificent 
record in those days for so long a voyage. On 

142 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA 

November 19 the high mountains of the coast 
of Sumatra appeared upon the horizon. From 
there Van Neck steered southward, and near 
the Sunda Islands he at last reached the danger- 




ous domains of the Portuguese. The cannon 
were inspected, the mechanism of the guns was 
well oiled, and everything was made ready for 
a possible fight. Before the coast of Java was 
reached one of the islands of the Sunda Archi- 
pelago was visited. Could the natives tell them 
anything about the Portuguese and their inten- 

143 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

tions? The natives could not do this, but in 
return asked the men whether they perhaps knew 
anything about a foreign expedition which had 
been in those parts a few years before? That 
expedition, it appeared, had left a very bad repu- 
tation behind on account of its cruelty and in- 
solence. 

Van Neck decided not to remain in this region, 
where his predecessor had made himself too 
thoroughly unpopular, and sailed direct for Ban- 
tam. He would take his risks. On November 
26, while the sun was setting, the three ships 
dropped anchor in that harbor. They spent an 
uncomfortable night, for nobody knew what sort 
of reception would await them on the next day. 
Houtman had been in great difficulty with both 
the sultan and the Portuguese. Very likely the 
ships, flying the Dutch flag, would be attacked in 
the morning. But when morning came, the ubiq- 
uitous Chinaman, who in the far Indies serves 
foreign potentates as money-changer, merchant, 
diplomatic agent, and handy-man in general, 
came rowing out to Van Neck's ship. He told 
the admiral that the sultan sent the Hollanders 

144 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA 

his very kind regards and begged them to accept 
a small gift of fresh fruit. The sultan was glad 
to see the Hollanders. If they would only send 
a messenger on shore the sultan would receive 
him at once. Meanwhile as a sign of good faith 
the Chinese intermediary was willing to stay on 
board the ship of the Hollanders. Nobody in 
the fleet, least of all the officers and sailors who 
remembered what had happened two years be- 
fore, had expected such a reception. They were 
soon told the reason of this change in attitude. 
After Houtman and his ships left in the summer 
of 1596 the Portuguese Government had sent a 
strong fleet to punish the Sultan of Bantam for 
having been too friendly to the Hollanders. 
This fleet had suffered a defeat, but since that 
time the people in Bantam had feared the ar- 
rival of another punitive expedition. The Hol- 
landers, therefore, came as very welcome de- 
fenders of the rights of the young sultan. It was 
decided that their services should be used for 
the defense of the harbor if the long-expected 
Portuguese fleet should make a new attack. It 
was in this role of the lesser of two evils that the 

145 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Hollanders finally were to conquer their Indian 
empire from the Portuguese. Van Neck was 
the first Dutch captain to use the local political 
situation for his own benefit. He sent his repre- 
sentative on shore, who was received with great 
ceremony. He explained how this fleet had 
been sent to the Indies by the mighty Prince of 
Orange, and he promised that the Bantam gov- 
ernment would be allowed to see all the official 
documents which the admiral had brought if 
they would deign to visit the ships. This invi- 
tation was not well received. The Bantam 
people had been familiar with the ways of white 
men for almost a hundred years. They dis- 
trusted all cordial invitations to come on board 
foreign ships, and they asked that the Holland- 
ers send their papers ashore. "No," Van Neck 
told them through his envoy, "a document given 
to me by the mighty Prince of Orange is too im- 
portant to be allowed out of my immediate 
sight." 

In the end the sultan, curious to see whether 
these letters could perhaps tell him something 
of further ships which might be on their way, 

146 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA 

agreed to make his appearance upon the ship of 
the admiral, where he was received with great 
courtesy. 

Then, after the fashion of the Indian ruler of 
his day and of our own, he demanded to know 
what his profits were to be in case he allowed 
the Hollanders to trade in his city. Van Neck 
began negotiations about the bribe which the dif- 
ferent functionaries were to receive. For a con- 
sideration of 3200 reals to the sultan and the com- 
mander of the harbor, the Dutch ships were at 
last given permission to approach the shore and 
buy whatever they wanted. For ten days long 
canoes filled with pepper and nutmeg sur- 
rounded the ships. The pepper was bought for 
three reals a bag. Everything was very pleas- 
ant, but one day Abdul, the native who came 
from Bali, got on shore and visited the city. 
Here among his own people he cut quite a dash, 
and bragging about the wonders of the great 
Dutch Republic, he volunteered the informa- 
tion that on the Amsterdam market he had seen 
how a bag of pepper was sold for 100 reals. 
That sum, therefore, was just ninety-seven reals 

147 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

more than the people in Bantam received for 
their own raw product. Of course they did not 
like the idea of getting so little, and at once they 
refused to sell to Van Neck at the old rate. It 
was a great disappointment. He tried to do bus- 
iness with some Chinamen, but they were worse 
than the Javanese. They offered their pepper 
to the Hollanders at a ridiculously low price, 
but after the bags had been weighed they were 
found to be weighted with stones and sand and 
pieces of glass. 

There was no end to all the small annoyances 
which the Dutch admiral was made to suffer. 
There were a number of Portuguese soldiers 
hanging about the town. They had been made 
prisoners during the last fatal expedition against 
Bantam, and they suffered a good many hard- 
ships. One day they were allowed to pay a visit 
to the Dutch ships, and the tales of their mis- 
ery were so harrowing that the admiral had 
given them some money to be used for the pur- 
pose of buying food and clothes. No sooner, 
however, were the prisoners back on dry land 
than they started the rumor that the Hollanders 

148 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA 

were dangerous pirates and ought not to be 
trusted. Van Neck vowed that he would hang 
his ungrateful visitors if ever they came to him 
again with their tales of woe. Meanwhile, in 
order to stop further talk, he promised to raise 
the price of pepper two reals. For five reals a 
bag his ships were now filled with a cargo of the 
costly spice. 

In a peaceful way the month of December 
went by. It was the last day of the year 1598 
when quite unexpectedly the lost ships that had 
been driven away from their admiral near the 
Cape of Good Hope appeared at Bantam. 
They had passed through many exciting ad- 
ventures. After they had lost sight of the com- 
mander-in-chief, they had first spent several days 
trying to discover his whereabouts. Then they 
had continued their way to get fresh water in 
Madagascar. They had reached the coast of 
the island safely, but just before they could land 
a sudden storm had driven them eastward. On 
the seventeenth of September they had again 
seen land, and they had dropped their anchors 
to discover to what part of the world they had 

149 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

been blown by the wind. The map did not show 
that there was any land in this region. There- 
fore on the eighteenth of September of the year 
1598 they had visited the island which lay be- 
fore them, and they found that they had reached 
paradise. All the sailors had been taken ashore, 
it being Sunday, and the ships' pastor had 
preached a wonderful sermon. So eloquent 
were his words that one of the Madagascar boys 
who was on the fleet had accepted Christian 
baptism then and there. After that for a full 
month officers and men had taken a holiday. 
Whatever they wished for the island provided 
in abundance. There was fresh water. There 
were hundreds of tame pigeons. There were 
birds which resembled an ostrich, although they 
were smaller and tasted better when cooked. 
There were gigantic bats and turtles so large that 
several men could take a ride on their back. 
Fish abounded in the rivers and the sea around 
the island, and it was thickly covered with all 
sorts of palm-trees. Indeed, it looked so fertile 
that it was decided to use it as a granary for 
future expeditions. Grain had been planted, 

150 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

and also beans and peas for the use of ships which 
might come during the next years. Then the 
island had been officially annexed for the benefit 
of the republic. It had been called Mauritius 
after Prince Maurice of Nassau, the Stadholder 
of Holland. Finally after a rooster and seven 
chickens had been given the freedom of this do- 
main, to assure future travelers of fresh eggs, the 
four ships had hoisted their sails and had come 
to Bantam to join their admiral. 

Van Neck now commanded several ships, 
which were loaded. But the others must await 
the arrival of a new supply of pepper, which was 
being brought to Bantam from the Moluccas by 
some enterprising Chinamen. This would take 
time, and Van Neck was still in a great hurry. 
He refused to consider the tempting offers of the 
Sultan of Bantam, who still wanted his help 
against his Portuguese enemies. Instead, he en- 
tered into negotiations with a Hindu merchant 
who offered to bring the other ships directly to 
the Moluccas, where they would be in the heart 
of the spice-growing islands. The Hindu was 
engaged, and navigated the ships safely to their 

152 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA 

destination. Here through their good behavior 
the Hollanders made such an excellent impres- 
sion upon the native ruler that they were al- 
lowed to establish two settlements on shore and 
leave a small garrison until they should return 
to buy more mace and nutmeg at incredibly 
reasonable terms. As for Van Neck, having 
saluted his faithful companions with a salvo of 
his big guns, which started a panic in the good 
town of Bantam, where the people still remem- 
bered the departure of Houtman, he sailed for 
the coast of Africa. 

He had every reason to be contented with his 
success. In a final audience with the governor 
of the city of Bantam he had promised this dig- 
nitary that the Hollanders would return the next 
year, "because that was the will of their mighty 
ruler." The governor, from his side, who upon 
this occasion had to deal with a much better class 
of men than Houtman and his crew of mutinous 
sailors, had decided that the Hollanders were 
preferable to the Portuguese, and he assured 
Van Neck of a cordial reception. 

The return voyage was not as prosperous as 
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DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

the outward trip had been. Dysentery attacked 
the fleet, and many of the best officers and men 
had to be sewn into their hammocks to be 
dropped into the ocean, where they found an 
honorable burial. St. Helena, with its fresh wa- 
ter and its many wild animals, was reached just 
when the number of healthy men had fallen to 
thirty. A week of rest and decent food was 
enough to cure all the men, and then they sailed 
for home. But so great was the hurry of this 
rich squadron to reach the markets of Amster- 
dam that Van Neck's ship was almost destroyed 
when it hoisted too many sails and when the wind 
broke two of the masts. It was not easy to re- 
pair this damage in the open sea. After several 
days some sort of jury rig was equipped. The 
big ship, with its short stubby mast, then looked 
so queer that several Dutch vessels which saw it 
appear upon the horizon off the Gulf of Biscay 
beat a hasty retreat. They feared that they had 
to do with a new sort of pirate, sailing the seas 
in the most recent piratical invention. 

On the nineteenth of July, after an absence of 
only one year and two months, the first part of 

154 



THE SECOND VOYAGE TO INDIA 

Van Neck's fleet returned safely to Holland. 
The cargo was unloaded, and was sold on the 
Amsterdam exchange. After the full cost of the 
expedition had been paid, each of the sharehold- 
ers received a profit of just one hundred per cent. 
Van Neck, who had established the first Dutch 
settlement in the Indies, was given a public re- 
ception by his good city and was marched in 
state to the town hall. 



iSS 



VAN NOORT CIRCUMNAVIGATES 
THE WORLD 



CHAPTER VI 

VAN NOORT CIRCUMNAVIGATES 
THE WORLD 

OLIVER VAN NOORT was the first 
Hollander to sail around the world. 
Incidentally, he was the fourth navi- 
gator to succeed in this dangerous enterprise 
since in the year 1520 the little ships of Ma- 
gellan had accomplished the feat of circum- 
navigating the globe. Of the hero of this 
memorable Dutch voyage we know almost noth- 
ing. He was a modest man, and except for a 
few lines of personal introduction which appear 
in the printed story of his voyage, which was 
published in Rotterdam, his home town, in the 
year 1620, in which he tells us that he had made 
many trips to different parts of the world, his 
life to us is a complete mystery. 

He was not, like Jacob van Heemskerk and 
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DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Van Neck, a man of education ; neither was he 
of very low origin. He had picked up a good 
deal of learning at the common schools. Very 
likely he had been the mate or perhaps the cap- 
tain of some small schooner, had made a little 




Olivier van Noort. 



money, and then had retired from the sea. 
Spending one's days on board a ship in the latter 
half of the sixteenth century was no pleasure. 
The ships were small. The cabins were uncom- 
fortable, and so low that nowhere one could stand 
up straight. Cooking had to be done on a very 

1 60 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

primitive stove, which could not always be used 
when the weather was bad. The middle part 
of the deck was apt to be flooded most of the 
time, and the flat-bottomed ships rolled and 
pitched horribly. Therefore, as soon as a man 
had made a little competency as the master of a 
small craft he was apt to look for some quiet 
occupation on shore. He had not learned a reg- 
ular trade which he could use on shore. Very 
often, therefore, he opened a small hotel or an 
inn or just an ale-house where he could tell yarns 
about whales and wild men and queer countries 
which he had seen in the course of his peregrina- 
tions. And when the evening came and the tired 
citizen wanted to smoke a comfortable pipe and 
discuss the politics of the pope, the emperor, 
kings, dukes, bishops and their Mightinesses, his 
own aldermen, he liked to do so under the guid- 
ance of a man who knew what was what in the 
world and who could compare the stadholder's 
victories over the Spaniards with those which 
King Wunga Wunga of Mozambique had 
gained over his Hottentot neighbors, and who 
knew that the wine of Oporto sold in Havana for 

161 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

less than the vinegar from Dantsic and the salted 
fish from Archangel. 

Therefore we are not surprised when in the 
year 1595 we find Oliver van Noort described 
as the owner of the "Double White Keys," an 
ale-house in the town of Rotterdam. He might 
have finished his days there in peace and pros- 
perity, but when Houtman returned from his 
first voyage and the craze for the riches of the 
Indies, or at least a share thereof, struck the town 
of Rotterdam, Van Noort, together with every- 
body else who could borrow a few pennies, be- 
gan to think of new ways of reaching the mar- 
velous island of Java, made of gold and jewels 
and the even more valuable pepper and nutmeg. 
Van Noort himself possessed some money and 
the rest he obtained from several of his best 
customers. With this small sum he founded 
a trading company of his own. He petitioned 
the estates general of the republic and the es- 
tates of his own province of Holland to assist him 
in an expedition toward the "Kingdom of Chili, 
the west coast of America, and if need be, the 
islands of the Moluccas." To make this impor- 

162 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

tant enterprise successful, the estates general 
were asked to give Van Noort and his trading 
company freedom of export and import for at 
least six voyages, and to present it with ten can- 
non and twelve thousand pounds of gunpowder. 
He asked for much in the hope of obtaining at 
least part of what he desired. 

In the winter of 1597 his request was granted. 
He received four guns, six thousand pounds of 
bullets, twelve thousand pounds of gunpowder, 
and a special grant which relieved him of the 
customary export tax for two voyages. This 
demand for cannon, gunpowder, and bullets 
gives us the impression that the expedition ex- 
pected to meet with serious trouble. That was 
quite true. The southern part of America was 
the private property of the Spaniards and the 
Portuguese. Anybody who ventured into those 
regions flying the Dutch colors did so at his own 
peril. Among his fellow-citizens Van Noort 
had the reputation of great courage. Nobody 
knew any precise details of his early life, but it 
was whispered, although never proved, that 
many years ago, long before the days of Hout- 

163 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

man, he had tried to reach the Indies all alone, 
but that he had preferred the more lucrative 
profession of pirate to the dangerous calling of 
the pioneer. Since, however, all his privateer- 
ing had been done at the expense of the Span- 
iards, nobody minded these few alleged ir- 
regularities of his youthful days. And the 
merchants who drank their pot of ale at his inn 
willingly provided him with the money which 
he needed, bade him go ahead, and helped him 
when during the winter of the year 1597 he was 
getting his two ships ready for the voyage. 

Now, it happened that at that time a num- 
ber of merchants in Amsterdam were working 
for the same purpose. They, too, wanted to 
sail to the Moluccas by way of the Strait of 
Magellan. For the sake of greater safety the 
two companies decided to travel together. In 
June of the year 1597 their fleet, composed of 
four ships, was ready for the voyage. Van 
Noort was to command the biggest vessel, the 
Mauritius, while the commander of the Amster- 
dam company was to be vice-admiral of the fleet 
on board the Henrick Frederick. The name of 

164 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

the vice-admiral was Jacob Claesz. We know 
nothing about his early career, but we know all 
the details of his tragic end. There were two 
other small ships. There was a yacht called 
the Eendracht, and there was a merchantman 
called the Hope. The tonnage of the ships is 
not mentioned, but since there were only two 
hundred and forty-eight men on the four ships, 
they must have been small even for that 
time. 

In a general way our meager information 
about the invested capital, the strange stories of 
the early lives of the commanders, and the very 
rough character of the crew show that we have 
to do with one of the many mushroom compa- 
nies, an enterprise which was not based upon very 
sound principles, but was of a purely speculative 
nature. During the earliest days of Indian 
trading, however, all good merchants were in 
such a hurry to make money to get to Java long 
before anybody else and to reach home ahead of 
all competitors that there was no time for the 
promoting of absolutely sound companies. 

On the other hand, the men who commanded 

i6 5 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

those first expeditions had all been schooled in 
the noble art of self-reliance during the first 
twenty terrible years of the war against Spain. 
They were brave, they were resourceful, they 
succeeded where others, more careful, would 
have failed. 

On the twenty-eighth of June of the year 1597 
Van Noort left Rotterdam to await his compan- 
ions from Amsterdam in the Downs, England. 
He waited for several weeks, but the ships did 
not appear, so he went back to Holland to find 
out what might have become of them. He 
found them lying at anchor in one of the Zee- 
land streams. Evidently there had been a mis- 
understanding as to the exact meeting-place of 
the two squadrons. Together they then began 
the voyage for a second time. They had lost a 
month and a half in waiting for each other, but 
at that date forty-five days more or less did not 
matter. The trip was to take a couple of years, 
anyway. 

First of all Van Noort went to Plymouth, 
where he had arranged to meet a British sailor, 
commonly referred to as "Captain Melis," a 

166 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

man who had been around the world with Cap- 
tain Cavendish in 1588, and who was familiar 
with the stormy regions around the southern part 
of the American continent. In exchange for one 
Englishman, Van Noort lost several good Dutch- 
men. Six of his sailors deserted, and could not 
be found again. 

The first part of the trip was along the coast 
of Africa, a road which we know from other ex- 
peditions. Then came a story with which we 
are only too familiar from previous accounts, 
for the much dreaded scurvy appeared among 
the men. When the fleet passed the small island 
of Principe in the Gulf of Guinea, it was decided 
to land there and try to obtain fresh water and 
fresh food. Unfortunately, this island was 
within the established domain of the Portuguese, 
and the Hollanders must be careful. Early in 
the morning of the day on which they intended 
to look for water they sent three boats ashore 
flying a white flag as a sign of their peaceful in- 
tentions. The inhabitants of the island came 
near the boats, also carrying a white flag. They 
informed the Hollanders that if they would 

168 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

kindly visit the near-by villages the natives 
would sell them everything they wanted, pro- 
vided the Hollanders paid cash. The men were 
ordered to stay near the boats, but four officers 
went farther inland. They were asked to come 
first of all to the Portuguese castle that was on 




the island. They went, but once inside, they 
were suddenly attacked, and three of them were 
murdered. The fourth one jumped out of the 
gate just in time to save his life. He ran to the 
shore. This was a great loss to the Hollanders, 
for among the men who had been killed was a 
brother of Admiral van Noort and the English 

169 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

pilot upon whom they depended to guide them 
through the difficult Strait of Magellan. 

To uphold the prestige of the Dutch Republic, 
Van Noort decided to make an example. The 
next day after he landed with 120 of his men 
and entrenched himself near the mouth of a 
river, so that he might fill his water-tanks at 
leisure. Then, following this river, he went 
into the interior of the country and burned 
down all the plantations and houses he could 
find. 

Well provided with fresh water, he thereupon 
crossed the Atlantic Ocean and steered for the 
coast of Brazil. On the ninth of February he 
dropped anchor in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, 
which was a Portuguese town. He carefully 
kept out of reach of the menacing guns of the 
fortification. The reception in Brazil was little 
more cordial than it had been on the other side 
of the ocean. The Portuguese sent a boat to the 
Dutch ships to ask what they wanted. The an- 
swer was that the Hollanders were peaceful trav- 
elers in need of fresh provisions. The provi- 
sions were promised for the next day, but Van 

170 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

Noort, who had heard similar promises before, 
was on his guard and for safety's sake he kept a 
few Portuguese sailors on his ship as hostages. 

On the morning of the next day he sent several 
of his men to the shore to get the supplies. They 
landed near a mountain called the Sugarloaf. 
Once more the Portuguese did not play the game 
fairly. They had posted a number of their sol- 
diers in a well-hidden ambush near the Sugar- 
loaf. These soldiers suddenly opened fire, 
wounded a large number of the Dutch seamen 
and took two of them prisoners. A little later 
a shot fired from one of the cannon of the castle 
killed a man on board the Eendracht. The two 
Dutch prisoners were safely returned the next 
day in exchange for the Portuguese hostages, 
but Van Noort was obliged to leave the town 
without getting his provisions. Therefore a few 
days later he landed on a small island near the 
coast where he found water and fruit, and his 
men caught fish and wild birds and were happy. 
Again the Portuguese interfered. They had 
ordered a number of Indians to follow the Dutch 
fleet and do whatever damage they could. 

171 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

When a Dutch boat with six men came rowing 
to the shore it was suddenly attacked by a large 
number of Indians in canoes. Two of the six 
men were killed. The other four were taken 
prisoner and were never seen again. 

Of course adventures of this sort were not 
very encouraging. Some of the officers sug- 
gested that, after all, it might be a better idea 
to discontinue the voyage around the South 
American coast before it was too late. They 
proposed that the ships should cross the Atlantic 
once more, and should either go to St. Helena 
and wait there until the next spring or should 
sail to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope ; 
for it was now the month of March, and in that 
part of the world our summer is winter and our 
winter is summer. Wherefore they greatly 
feared that the ships could not reach the Strait 
of Magellan before the winter storms of July 
should set in. It was upon such occasions that 
Van Noort showed his courage and his resolute 
spirit. His expedition was in bad shape. One 
of the ships, the Eendracht, was leaking badly. 
Through the bad water, the hard work, and the 

172 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

insufficient food a large number of sailors had 
fallen ill, and every day some of them died. 
Wherever the expedition tried to land on the 
coast of Brazil to get water and supplies they 
found strong Portuguese detachments which 
drove them away. Not for a moment, however, 
did Van Noort dream of giving up his original 
plans. 

At last, after many weeks and by mere chance, 
he found a little island called St. Clara where 
there were no Portuguese and no unfriendly 
natives and where he could build a fort on shore 
to land the sick men and cure them of their 
scurvy with fresh herbs. The expedition re- 
mained on Santa Clara for three weeks. Grad- 
ually the strength of the men returned, but they 
were still very weak, and it was now necessary 
that they should get plenty of exercise in the 
open air. Therefore the admiral ordered the 
kitchens to be built at a short distance from the 
fort. Those men who walked out to the kitchen 
got more dinner than those who demanded that 
their food be brought to them. Soon they all 

J 74 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

walked, and they greatly benefited by this little 
scheme of their commander. On June 28 they 
were able to go back to the ship, and then they 
set sail for the south. Two men, however, who 
had caused trouble since the beginning of the 
voyage and who seemed to be incorrigible were 
left behind on the island to get home as best they 
could. They never did. Even such a severe 
punishment was not a deterrent. A few days 
later a sailor attacked and wounded one of the 
officers with a knife. He was spiked to the 
mast with the same knife stuck through his right 
hand. Then he was left standing until he had 
pulled the knife out himself. It was a very 
rough crew, and only a system of discipline en- 
forced in this cruel fashion saved the officers 
from being murdered and thrown overboard, so 
that the men might return home or become 
pirates. 

I have just mentioned the bad condition of 
the Eendracht. The ship was so unseaworthy, 
and so great was the danger of drowning all on 
board, that Van Noort at last decided to sacri- 

175 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

fice the vessel. The sailors were divided among 
the other ships, and the Eendracht was burned 
off the coast of Brazil. 

Van Noort now reached the southern part of 
the American continent. 

The Strait of Magellan had been discovered 
in 1530. But even in the year 1598 it was little 
known. The few mariners who had passed 
through had all told of the difficulty of navigat- 
ing these narrows, with their swift currents run- 
ning from ocean to ocean and their terrible 
storms, not to speak of the fog. Crossing from 
the Atlantic into the Pacific was therefore some- 
thing which was considered a very difficult feat, 
and Van Noort did not dare to risk it with his 
ships in their bad condition. He made for the 
little Island of Porto Deseado, which Cavendish 
had discovered only a few years before. There 
was a sand-bank near the coast, and upon this the 
ships were anchored at high tide. Then, when 
the tide fell, the ships were left on the dry sand, 
and the men had several hours in which to clean, 
tar, and calk them and generally overhaul 
everything that needed repairing. On the 

176 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

shore of the island a regular smithy was con- 
structed. For three months everybody worked 
hard to get the vessels in proper condition for 
the dangerous voyage. 

While they were on the island the captain of 
the Hope died. He was buried with great so- 




lemnity, and the former captain of the Een- 
dracht was made commander of the Hope, 
which was rebaptized the Eendracht. This 
word means harmony in Dutch, and the Good 
Lord knows that they needed harmony during 
the many difficult months which were to follow. 
On November 5, fourteen months after Van 

177 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Noort left Holland, and when the number of 
his men had been reduced to 148, he at last 
reached the Strait of Magellan. The ship of 
the admiral entered the strait first, and was fol- 
lowed by the new Eendracht. The Henrick 
Frederick, however, commanded by Jacob 
Claesz, the vice-admiral, went her own way. 
Van Noort signaled to this ship to keep close to 
the Mauritius, but he never received an answer. 
Van Noort then ordered Claesz to come to the 
admiral's vessel and give an account of himself. 
The only answer which he received to that mes- 
sage was that Captain Claesz was just as good 
as Admiral van Noort, and was going to do just 
exactly what he pleased. 

This was a case of open rebellion, but Van 
Noort was so busy navigating the difficult cur- 
rent that he could not stop to make an investi- 
gation. Four times his ship was driven back by 
the strong wind. At the fifth attempt the ship 
at last passed the first narrows and anchored 
well inside the strait. The next day they passed 
a high mountain which they called Cape Nas- 
sau, and where they saw many natives running 

179 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

toward the shore. The natives in the southern 
part of the continent were not like the ordinary 
Indian with whom the Hollanders were fa- 
miliar. They were very strong and brave and 
caused the Hollanders much difficulty. They 
handled bows and arrows well, and their coats, 
made of skin, gave them a general appearance 
of greater civilization than anybody had ex- 
pected to find in this distant part of the world. 
When the Dutch sailors rowed to the shore of 
the strait, the Indians attacked them at once. It 
was an unequal battle of arrows against bullets. 
The natives were driven back into their moun- 
tains, where they defended themselves in front 
of a large hollow rock. At last, however, all 
the men had been killed, and then the sailors 
discovered that the grotto was filled with many 
women and children. They did not harm 
these, but captured four small boys and two lit- 
tle girls to take home to Holland. It seems to 
have been an inveterate habit of early expedi- 
tions to distant countries to take home some 
natives as curiosities. Beginning with Colum- 
bus, every explorer had brought a couple of 

1 80 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

natives with him when he returned home. The 
poor things usually died of small-pox or con- 
sumption or some other civilized disease. In 




case they kept alive, they became a sort of 
nondescript town-curiosity. What Van Noort 
intended to do with little Patagonians in Rotter- 
dam I do not know, but he had half a dozen on 
board when on November 28 his two ships 
reached the spot where they expected to find a 
strong Spanish castle. 

This fortress, so they knew, had been built 
181 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

after the attack of Drake on the west coast of 
America. Drake's expedition had caused a 
panic among the Spanish settlements of Chile 
and Peru. Orders had come from Madrid to 
fortify the Strait of Magellan and close the nar- 
rows to all foreign vessels. A castle had been 
built and a garrison had been sent. Then, how- 
ever, as happened often in Spain, the home 
government had forgotten all about this isolated 
spot. No provisions had been forwarded. The 
country itself, being barren and cold, did not 
raise anything which a Spaniard could eat. 
After a few years the castle had been deserted. 
When Cavendish sailed through the strait he 
had taken the few remaining cannon out of the 
ruins. Van Noort did not even find the ruins. 
Two whole months Van Noort spent in the 
strait. He took his time in this part of the voy- 
age. He dropped anchor in a bay which he 
called Olivier's Bay, and there began to build 
some new life-boats. 

After a few days the mutinous Henrick Fred- 
erick also appeared in this bay. Van Noort 
asked Claesz to come on board his ship and ex- 

182 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

plain his strange conduct. The vice-admiral 
refused to obey. He was taken prisoner, and 
brought before a court-martial. We do not 
know the real grounds for the strange conduct 
of Claesz. He might have known that disci- 
pline in those days meant something brutally 
severe; and yet he disobeyed his admiral's posi- 
tive orders, and when he was brought before the 
court-martial he could not or would not defend 
himself. He was found guilty, and he was con- 
demned to be put on shore. He was given some 
bread and some wine, and when the fleet sailed 
away he was left behind all alone. There was 
of course a chance that another ship would pick 
him up. A few weeks before other Dutch ships 
had been in the strait. But this chance was a 
very small one, and the sailors of Van Noort 
knew it. They said a prayer for the soul of 
their former captain who was condemned to die 
a miserable death far away from home. Yet no 
one objected to this punishment. Navigation 
to the Indies in the sixteenth century was as 
dangerous as war, and insubordination could 
not be tolerated, not even when the man who 

183 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

refused to obey orders was one of the original 
investors of the expedition and second in com- 
mand. 

On the twenty-ninth of February Van Noort 
reached the Pacific. The last mile from the 
strait into the open sea took him four weeks. 
He now sailed northward along the coast of 
South America. Two weeks later, during a 
storm, the Henrick Frederick disappeared. 
Such an occurrence had been foreseen. Van 
Noort had told his captains to meet him near 
the island of Santa Maria in case they should 
become separated from him during the night or 
in a fog. Therefore he did not worry about the 
fate of the ship, but sailed for the coast of Chile, 

After a short visit and a meeting with some 
natives, who told him that they hated the Span- 
iards and welcomed the Hollanders as their de- 
fenders against the Spanish oppressors, Van 
Noort reached the island of Santa Maria. In 
the distance he saw a ship. Of course he 
thought that this must be his own lost vessel 
waiting for him; but when he came near, the 
strange ship hoisted her sails and fled. It was 

184 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

a Spaniard called the Buen Jesus. The Dutch 
admiral could not allow this ship to escape. It 
might have warned the Spanish admiral in 
Lima, and then Van Noort would have been 




obliged to fight the entire Spanish Pacific fleet. 
The Eendracht was ordered to catch the Buen 
Jesus. This she did, for the Dutch ships could 
sail faster than the Spanish ones, though they 
were smaller. Van Noort had done wisely. 
The Spaniard was one of a large fleet detailed 
to watch the arrival of the Dutch vessels. The 
year before another Dutch fleet had reached the 
Pacific. It suffered a defeat at the hands of 

185 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

the Spaniards. This had served as a warning. 
The Hollanders did not have the reputation of 
giving up an enterprise when once they had 
started upon it, and the Spanish fleet was kept 
cruising in the southern part of the Pacific to 
destroy whatever Dutch ships might try to enter 
the private domains of Spain. 

From that moment Van Noort's voyage and 
his ships in the Pacific were as safe as a man 
smoking a pipe in a powder-magazine. They 
might be destroyed at any moment. As a best 
means of defense, the Hollanders decided to 
make a great show of strength. They did not 
wait for the assistance of the Henrick Frederick, 
but sailed at once to Valparaiso, took several 
Spanish ships anchored in the roads, and burned 
all of the others except one, which was added 
to the Dutch fleet. From the captain of the 
Buen Jesus Van Noort had heard that a number 
of Hollanders were imprisoned in the castle of 
Valparaiso. He sent ashore, asking for infor- 
mation, and he received letters from a Dutch- 
man, asking for help. 

Van Noort, however, was too weak to attack 
186 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

the town, but he thought that something might 
be done in this case through kindness. So he 
set all the crew of the Buen Jesus except the 
mate free, and him he kept as an hostage, and 
sent the men to the Spanish commander with 
his compliments. Thereupon he continued his 
voyage, but was careful to stay away from Lima, 
where he knew there were three large Spanish 
vessels waiting for him. Instead of that, he 
made for the Cape of San Francisco, where he 
hoped to capture the Peruvian silver fleet. 
Quite accidentally, however, he discovered that 
he was about to run into another trap. Some 
Negro slaves who had been on board the Buen 
Jesus, and who were now with Van Noort, 
spread the rumor that more than fifty thousand 
pounds of gold which had been on the Buen 
Jesus had been thrown overboard just before the 
Hollanders captured the vessel. The mate of 
the ship was still on the Mauritius, and he was 
asked if this was true. He denied it, but he 
denied it in such a fashion that it was hard to 
believe him. Therefore he was tortured. Not 
very much, but just enough to make him desir- 

187 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

ous of telling the truth. He then told that the 
gold had actually been on board the Buen Jesus; 
and since he was once confessing, he volun- 
teered further information, and now told Van 
Noort that the captain of the Buen Jesus and he 
had arranged to warn the Spanish fleet to await 
the Hollanders near Cape San Francisco and to 
attack them there while the Hollanders were 
watching the coast of Peru for the Peruvian 
silver fleet. No further information was 
wanted, and the Spaniard was released. He 
might have taken this episode as a warning to 
be on his good behavior. Thus far he had been 
well treated. He slept and took his meals in 
Van Noort's own cabin. But soon afterward he 
tried to start a mutiny among the Negro slaves 
who had served with him on the Spanish man- 
of-war. Without further trial he was then 
thrown overboard. 

The expedition against the silver fleet, how- 
ever, had to be given up. It would have been 
too dangerous. It became necessary to leave 
the eastern part of the Pacific and to cross to the 
Indies as fast as possible. The Spanish ship 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

which had been captured in Valparaiso proved 
to be a bad sailor and was burned. The two 
Dutch ships, with a crew of about a hundred 
men, sailed alone for the Marianne Islands. 
Some travelers have called these islands the 
Ladrones. That means the islands of the 
Thieves, and the natives who came flocking out 
to the ships showed that they deserved this 
designation. They were very nimble-fingered, 
and they stole whatever they could find. They 
would climb on board the ships of Van Noort, 
take some knives or merely a piece of old iron, 
and before anybody could prevent them they 
had dived overboard and had disappeared 
under water. All day long their little canoes 
swarmed around the Dutch ships. They of- 
fered many things for sale, but they were very 
dishonest in trade, and the rice they sold was 
full of stones, and the bottoms of their rice bas- 
kets were filled with cocoanuts. Two days were 
spent getting fresh water and buying food, and 
then Van Noort sailed for the Philippine Is- 
lands. On the fourteenth of October of the year 
1600 he landed on the eastern coast of Luzon. 

189 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

By this time the Dutch ships were in the heart 
of the Spanish colonies, and it was necessary to 
be very careful not to be detected as Holland- 
ers. The natives on shore, who had seen them 
in the distance, warned the Spanish authorities, 
and early in the morning a sloop rowed by 
natives brought a Spanish officer. 

Van Noort arranged a fine little comedy for 
his benefit. He hoisted the Spanish flag and 
he dressed a number of his men in cowls, so that 
they would look like monks. These peeped 
over the bulwarks when the Spaniard came 
near, mumbling their prayers with great devo- 
tion. 

Van Noort himself, with the courtesy of the 
professional innkeeper, received his guest, and 
in fluent French told him that his ship was 
French and that he was trading in this part of 
the Indies with the special permission of his 
Majesty the Spanish king. He regretted to in- 
form his visitor that his first mate had just died 
and that he did not know exactly in which part 
of the Indies his ship had landed. Further- 
more he told the Spaniard that he was sadly in 

191 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

need of provisions and this excellent boarding 
officer was completely taken in by the comedy 
and at once gave Van Noort rice and a number 
of live pigs. The next day a higher officer 
made his appearance. Again that story of be- 
ing a French ship was told, and, what is more, 
was believed. Van Noort was allowed to buy 
what he wanted and to drop anchor on the coast. 
To expedite his work, he sent one of his sailors 
who spoke Spanish fluently to the shore. This 
man reported that the Spaniards never even con- 
sidered the possibility of an attack by Dutch 
ships so far away from home and so well pro- 
tected by their fleet in the Pacific. Everything 
seemed safe. 

v But at last the Spaniards, who had heard a 
lot about the wonderful commission given to 
this strange captain by the King of France and 
the King of Spain, but who had never seen it, 
became curious. Quite suddenly they sent a 
captain accompanied by a learned priest who 
could verify the documents. It was a difficult 
case for the Dutch admiral. His official letters 
were all signed by the man with whom Spain 

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CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

was in open warfare, Prince Maurice of Nas- 
sau. When this name was found at the bottom 
of Van Noort's documents, his little comedy was 
over. Nobody thereafter was allowed to leave 
the ship, and the natives were forbidden to trade 
with the Hollander. Van Noort, however, had 
obtained the supplies he needed. He had an 
abundance of fresh provisions, and two natives 
had been hired to act as pilot in the straits be- 
tween the different Philippine Islands. 

The next few weeks Van Noort actually spent 
among those islands, and with his two ships ter- 
ribly battered after a voyage of more than two 
years of travel he spread terror among the Span- 
iards. Many ships were taken, and landing 
parties destroyed villages and houses. Finally 
he even dared to sail into the Bay of Manila. 
Under the guns of the Spanish fleet he set fire 
to a number of native ships, and then spent sev- 
eral days in front of the harbor taking the cargo 
out of the ships which came to the Spanish 
capital to pay tribute. As a last insult, he sent 
a message to the Spanish governor to tell him 
that he intended to visit his capital shortly, and 

193 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

then got ready to depart for further conquest. 
He had waited just a few hours too long and 
he had been just a trifle too brave, for before he 




could get ready for battle his ships were at- 
tacked by two large Spanish men-of-war. The 
Mauritius was captured. That is to say, the 
Spaniards drove all the Hollanders from her 
deck and jumped on board. But the crew 
fought so bravely from below with guns and 
spears and small cannon that the Spaniards were 
driven back to their own ship. It was a des- 

194 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

perate fight. If the Hollanders had been taken 
prisoner, they would have been hanged with- 
out trial. Van Noort encouraged his men, and 
told them that he would blow up the ship before 
he would surrender. Even those who were 
wounded fought like angry cats. At last a 
lucky shot from the Mauritius hit the largest 
Spaniard beneath the water-line. It was the 
ship of the admiral of Manila, and at once be- 
gan to sink. There was no hope for any one on 
board her. In the distance Van Noort could 
see that the Eendracht, which had only twenty- 
five men, had just been taken by the other Span- 
ish ship. With his own wounded crew he could 
not go to her assistance. To save his own ves- 
sel, he was obliged to escape as fast as possible. 
He hoisted his sails as well as he could with the 
few sailors who had been left unharmed. Of 
fifty-odd men five were dead and twenty-six 
were badly wounded. Right through the 
quiet sea, strewn with pieces of wreckage and 
scores of men clinging to masts and boxes and 
tables, the Mauritius made her way. With 
cannon and guns and spears the survivors on the 

i95 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Mauritius killed as many Spaniards as possible. 
The others were left to drown. Then the ship 
was cleaned, the dead Spaniards were thrown 
overboard, and piloted by two Chinese traders 
who were picked up during the voyage, Van 
Noort safely reached the coast of B'orneo. 
Here the natives almost succeeded in killing the 
rest of his men. In the middle of the night they 
tried to cut the cables of the last remaining 
anchor. The Mauritius would have been driven 
on shore, and the natives could have plundered 
her at leisure; but their plan was discovered by 
the Hollanders. A second attempt to hide 
eighty well-armed men in a large canoe which 
was pretending to bring a gift of several 
oxen came to nothing when the natives saw that 
Van Noort's men made ready to fire their 
cannon. 

Another year had now gone by. It was Jan- 
uary of 1601, and Van Noort's condition was 
still very dangerous. There were no supplies 
on board. The Chinese pilots did not know the 
coast of Borneo. There were many islands and 
many straits, and Van Noort had lost all idea 

196 



ill ii \ 






mmwm 
mAW 

mfflfim- 

Mmmm 




CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

as to his exact position. When he met a Chi- 
nese vessel on the way to India he forced it to 
heave to and stole the mate, who was an experi- 
enced sailor. Then the wind suddenly refused 
to blow from the right direction, and it was 
many weeks before the Mauritius reached the 
harbor of Cheribon, in the central part of Java, 
many miles away from Bantam. 

Van Noort called upon his few remaining of- 
ficers to decide what they ought to do. If his 
expedition were to be a financial success, he 
must find some place where he could buy spices. 
Bantam was near by, but according to the sto- 
ries of Houtman and his expedition, the people 
in Bantam were very unfriendly. With his 
twenty-three men the Dutch commander did 
not dare to risk another battle. It is true that 
since the visit of Houtman his successor Van 
Neck had established very-good relations with 
the sultan; but Van Noort had been away from 
home for over three years, and knew nothing of 
Van Neck's voyage. 

He might have guessed that there were Hol- 
landers in Bantam when he found that there 

199 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

were no spices to be had in any of the other 
Javanese ports. Wherever he went he heard 
the same story. All the spices were now being 
sent to Bantam, where the Hollanders paid a 
very high price for them. But Van Noort dis- 
trusted this report. It might be another plot 
of the Portuguese to catch him, and to keep out 
of harm's way, he sailed through the straits of 
Bali, avoided the north coast of Java and went 
to the Cape of Good Hope. 

The home trip was the most successful part 
of the entire voyage. It is true that, without 
good instruments, the Dutch ships once more 
lost their bearings. They thought that they 
were two hundred miles away from the coast of 
Africa when they had already passed the cape. 
On the twenty-sixth of May Van Noort landed 
at St. Helena. Three weeks later he met a 
large fleet. The ships flew the Dutch flag. 
They were part of a squadron commanded by 
Jacob van Heemskerk, outward bound for their 
second voyage to India. From them the Hol- 
landers got their first news from home; how 
Van Neck's expedition had been a great success, 

200 



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S-3 6T 1 


S| jt| 


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DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

and how Bantam, which had been carefully 
avoided, was now a Dutch settlement. Van 
Noort told them of his fight with the Spanish 
fleet in different parts of the Pacific, and in turn 
he was informed of the great victory which 
Prince Maurice had just won over the Span- 
iards near Nieuwpoort which had assured the 
Dutch Republic its final liberty. Then both 
fleets continued their voyage. On the twenty- 
eighth of August Van Noort and forty-four out 
of the two hundred and forty-eight who had 
sailed away with him three years before came 
back to Rotterdam. 

The next year a few other men who had be- 
longed to the expedition reached Holland. 
They had served on the Henrick Frederick 
which had disappeared just after Van Noort 
had left the Strait of Magellan. They had 
waited for their commander near the island of 
Santa Maria, but the arrival of the Spanish 
man-of-war had spoiled all idea of meeting 
each other on that spot. The Henrick Frede- 
rick had crossed the Pacific alone. Many of 
her men had died, and the others were so weak 

202 



CIRCUMNAVIGATES THE WORLD 

that when they reached the Moluccas they 
could no longer handle the ship. They had 
sold it to the Sultan of Ternate for some bags 
of nutmeg, and with a small sloop of their own 
construction they had reached Bantam in April 
of the year 1602. There they had found a part 
of the same fleet of Heemskerk which Van 
Noort had met on the coast of Africa. On one 
of the ships many sailors had just died. Their 
place had been offered to the men of the old 
Henrick Frederick. In the winter of 1602 
they returned to their home city. 

That ended one of the most famous of the 
expeditions which tried to establish for the 
Hollanders a new route to the Indies through 
the Strait of Magellan. But while Van Noort 
was in the Pacific the route of the cape had 
proved to be such a great and easy success that 
further attempts to reach Java and the Moluc- 
cas by way of the Strait of Magellan were here- 
after given up. The Pacific trading companies 
were changed into ordinary Indian companies 
which sent all their ships around the cape. As 
for Van Noort, who was the first Hollander to 

203 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

sail around the world, he entered the naval 
service of the republic, and had a chance to 
practise his very marked ability as a leader of 
men in more dangerous circumstances. As an 
Indian trader he would not have been a great 
success. The old irresponsible buccaneering 
days of that trade were gone forever. The dif- 
ficult art of founding a commercial empire by 
persuasion rather than by force was put into 
the hands of men who were not only brave, but 
also tactful. 



204 



THE ATTACK UPON THE WEST 
COAST OF AMERICA 



CHAPTER VII 

THE ATTACK UPON THE WEST 
COAST OF AMERICA 

THIS is the story of another expedi- 
tion which tried to get possession of 
the Indian route by way of the Strait 
of Magellan. It was a sad business. 

Oliver Van Noort, although he met with 
many difficulties, managed to bring one ship 
home and added greatly to the fame of the 
Dutch navigators. But the second expedition, 
equipped by two of the richest men of Rotter- 
dam and sent out under the best of auspices, 
proved to be a total failure. The capital of 
half a million guilders which had been invested 
was an absolute loss. Most of the participants 
in the voyage died. The ships were lost. Per- 
haps everything had been prepared just a trifle 
too carefully. Van Noort, with his little ships, 

207 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 



knew that he had to depend upon his own 
energy and resourcefulness; but the captains of 
the five ships which left Rotterdam on the 
twenty-seventh of July, 1598, with almost five 
hundred men were under the impression that 

BTOiftoptgPerfjael ban fgette&etiijf 

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half of the work had been done at home by the 
owners. Perhaps, too, there is such a thing as 
luck in navigating the high seas. One fleet sails 
for the Indies and has good weather all the way 
across the ocean. When the wind blows hard 
it blows from the right direction. The next 

208 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

squadron which leaves two weeks later meets 
with storms and suffers from one unfortunate 
accident after the other; everybody gets sick, 
and when the sailors look for relief on land they 
find nothing but a barren desert. And so it 
goes. It is not for us to complain, but to recite 
faithfully the sad adventures of the good ships 
the Hoop, the Liefde, the Geloof, the Trowwe, 
and the Blyde Boodschap, all of which tried 
very hard to accomplish what Van Noort had 
been allowed to do with much less trouble. 

The ships, as we said, left Rotterdam in July, 
and after two months they reached the Cape 
Verde Islands. There they found a couple of 
ships from Hamburg, for the Germans at the 
early period of exploring and discoveries were 
very active sailors. A few years later, how- 
ever, the Thirty Years' War was to destroy their 
seafaring enterprises for centuries at least. 

Near these islands the Hollanders had their 
first encounter with the Portuguese. The sto- 
ries of such meetings between the early Dutch 
navigators and the Portuguese owners of Afri- 
can and Asiatic islands always read the same 

209 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

way. The Hollanders ask for leave to go on 
shore to get fresh water and to buy provisions. 
This leave is never granted. Then the two 
parties fight each other. In most cases the 
Hollanders are victorious, though they still 
have too much respect for the traditional power 
of the Portuguese to risk a definite attack upon 
their strongholds. Very slowly and only after 
many years of experiment do they venture to 
drive the Portuguese out of their colonies and 
take possession of this large, but badly managed, 
empire. 

When our five Dutch ships reached the is- 
land of San Thome they sent a messenger to the 
Portuguese commander and asked him, please, 
to give them some fresh water. The Portu- 
guese told the Hollanders to wait. But they 
could not wait, for the water on board the ships 
had all been used up. Therefore they landed 
with one hundred and fifty men and charged 
the hill upon which the Portuguese had built a 
fortress. The garrison was forced to surren- 
der. Before any more fighting took place the 
Portuguese offered to treat the Hollanders as 

210 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

welcome guests if they would sail to the next 
harbor of San Iago, where there was an abun- 
dance of stores and where general provisions 
were for sale at reasonable prices. This pro- 
posal was accepted. The sailors went back to 
their ships and made for San Iago. The wind, 
however, was not favorable, and they did not 
reach their destination until the hour appointed 
to meet the Portuguese officials had passed. 
When they arrived near the shore they noticed 
that the soldiers on land were very active and 
had placed a number of cannon in an ambush 
from which they could destroy the Dutch ships 
as soon as they should have dropped anchor. 
This, of course, was a breach of good faith. 
So back they went to their first landing-place. 
They landed, filled all their water-tanks, took 
the corn stored in a small storehouse, killed sev- 
eral Portuguese, caught a large number of 
turtles for the sick people on board, and hoisted 
sail to cross the Atlantic Ocean. 

And then the bad luck which was to follow 
this expedition began. The admiral of the 
fleet, Jacques Mahu, died suddenly of a fever 

211 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

and was buried at sea. Two weeks later so 
many men were desperately ill with the same 
fever that the ships were obliged to return upon 
their own track and establish a hospital upon 
one of the islands off the coast of Guinea. All 
this time the wind blew from the wrong direc- 
tion. When at last they saw land, they found 
that they were near the coast of Lower Guinea. 
They sent a boat to the shore to discover some 
native tribe which owned cattle. But the na- 
tives, who feared all white men as possible 
slave-dealers, ran into the bushes and carefully 
took their possessions with them. Fortunately, 
after a few days another Dutch ship appeared 
upon the horizon, and the first mate of this ves- 
sel, a Frenchman by birth, knew the language 
of the negroes. Through him a message was 
sent to the king of a small tribe, and when it 
had been proved that the Hollanders were not 
slave-dealers, but honest merchants on their 
way to the Indies and willing to pay money for 
whatever they bought, their newly elected com- 
mander, Sebalt de Weert was received in state 
and invited to dine with his Majesty. 

212 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 



This dinner, much to the regret of the hun- 
gry guests, was a poor affair. The negro chief- 
tain tried to be very civil to his guests. In 
their honor he had powdered himself white 



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with the ashes of a wood fire, but the food was 
neither abundant nor very good. The Hol- 
landers decided to invite his Majesty to one of 
their own dinners as a good example and a hint. 
From among the few supplies which were left 
on board they arranged so excellent a dinner 
that his royal Highness ate everything on the 
table and then fell fast asleep in his chair. But 
when the next day the Hollanders tried to buy 

213 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

the fresh provisions which they expected to get, 
they found that the domains of the king pro- 
duced nothing but one single goat, a lean goat 
at that, and four puny chickens. 

The coast of Guinea, sometimes called the 
"dry Gallows," gets its agreeable reputation 
from the fact that the malarial fevers of this 
swampy- region usually kill all the white people 
who venture to settle there. The new com- 
mander of the expedition caught this malaria, 
and was sick in his bed for over two months. 
Sixteen of his sailors died, and finally the expe- 
dition was obliged to flee to the healthy islands, 
which of course belonged to the Portuguese. 
Early in December they sailed toward Anna- 
bon. Once again the Portuguese refused them 
both water and food. A troop of men were 
landed to take by force what they could not 
obtain through an appeal to Christian charity. 
The Portuguese did not await this attack, but 
surrendered their fortress and fled toward the 
mountains. From there they arranged sniping 
expeditions which killed many Hollanders. 
As a punishment, Admiral de Weert burned 

214 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

the white settlement and the church. He took 
all the provisions which were stored in the little 
town, and on the second of January of the year 
1599 he tried once more to cross the Atlantic 
Ocean. 

This time the wind was favorable. Soon the 
ships had passed out of the hot equatorial re- 
gions. The sailors who had suffered from 
scurvy and malaria began to feel better in the 
colder climate of the Argentinian coast. They 
recovered so fast and they had such a great ap- 
petite after their long-enforced fast that many 
of them threatened to die from over-feeding. 
And one poor fellow who was so hungry that 
he stole bread at night from the ship's pantry 
was publicly hanged to stop further theft of the 
meager supplies. When the ships were near 
the coast of South America things went wrong 
once more. First of all the sailors were fright- 
ened by the sudden appearance of what they 
supposed to be blood upon the surface of the 
ocean. As far as the eye could reach, the water 
was of a dark-red color. This phenomenon, 
however, proved to be caused by billions of lit- 

215 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

tie plants. They made the water look quite 
horrible, but they were entirely harmless. A 
few days later one of the men, an Englishman, 
while at dinner suddenly uttered a dreadful 
scream and fell backward, dead. The next day 
another one of the sailors suddenly became in- 
sane and tried to scratch and bite everybody 
who came near him. After three days his con- 
dition improved somewhat, but he never recov- 
ered his reason. When he was put to bed at 
night he would not allow himself to be covered 
up. One very cold night both his feet were 
frozen and had to be amputated. That was the 
end of the poor fellow. He did not survive the 
operation. 

It was a sad expedition which at last reached 
the Strait of Magellan on the sixth of April of 
the year 1599. Happily the weather near the 
strait was fine. There was plenty of fresh 
water on the shore. The men killed hundreds 
of birds, caught geese and ducks, and found a 
large supply of oysters. But when finally the 
day came on which they tried to enter the strait, 
the wind suddenly veered around, and during 

216 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

four months the ships were forced to stay in 
their little harbor. They had enough to eat 
and they had found wood to keep warm, but 
much valuable time was lost, and when the 
winter at last came upon them with sudden vio- 
lence they were entirely unprepared for it. 
The reports of the expeditions of Magellan and 
Drake and Cavendish had shown that an expe- 
dition around the world was apt to suffer from 
too much heat, but rarely from too much cold. 
Except for the few miles of the Strait of Ma- 
gellan, the ships sailed in tropical or semi- 
tropical regions all the time. Therefore the 
Dutch ships had not brought any heavy clothes 
or furs, which would have taken up a lot of 
room, and the food which had been put up for 
them in Holland had been prepared with the 
idea of supporting men who did their work 
under a blazing sun. When they were obliged 
to live for a long time in a raw, cold climate 
and work hard, hunting and fishing and gath- 
ering wood amid snow and icy winds, the 
sailors did not get sufficient nourishment. From 
sheer misery and exposure one hundred and 

217 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

twenty men died within less than four months. 
Among them was the captain of the Trouwe. 




He was the second officer to perish before his 
ship had reached the Pacific Ocean. 

But illness was not the only enemy of this ex- 
pedition. The natives of the south coast joined 
the terrible climate in its attack upon the Hol- 
landers. They murdered Dutch sailors when 
these had gone on shore to look for fire-wood 
or to examine their traps. They killed several 
men and they wounded more. Being wounded 

218 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

was almost as bad as being killed outright, for 
the spears of the natives were made with nasty 
barbs which caused very bad wounds. When 
they once had penetrated into a man's arm or 
hand, the only way to get them out successfully 
was by pushing them through until they came 
out again at the other side, or cut away all the 
flesh, in both cases a very painful operation. 

At last, on the twentieth of August, the wind 
turned, and the ships were able to enter the 
strait. The joy of the men did not last very 
long. The next day there was no wind at all, 
and once more the fleet anchored. To keep his 
few remaining men busy, the commander ar- 
ranged an expedition on shore. It was the first 
time that a Dutch fleet had been in this part of 
the world, and the event must be properly cele- 
brated. A high pole was planted in a conspic- 
uous spot on shore, and the adventures of the 
expedition and the names of the leaders were 
carved on the pole. Near this pole a small 
cemetery was made where two sailors who had 
died the night before were buried. In the eve- 
ning all went back to their ships. When they 

219 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

returned the next morning, they found that the 
natives had hacked the monument to pieces and 
the corpses of the dead Hollanders had been 
dug out of the earth and had been cut into little 
bits and were spread all over the shore. This 
humiliating experience was the last one which 
they suffered in the strait. The wind at last 
turned to their advantage and on the third of 
September the ships reached the Pacific Ocean. 
The good weather lasted just seven days. A 
week later, in the night of the tenth of Septem- 
ber, a severe storm attacked the little fleet, and 
the next morning the ships had lost sight of one 
another. They came together after a short 
search, but during the next night there was an- 
other gale, and in the morning three of the five 
ships had disappeared. Only the Trouwe and 
the Geloof were apparently saved. During 
three weeks these two ships floated aimlessly 
about, driven hither and thither upon the angry 
waves of the Pacific Ocean. They had few 
supplies left, and they could not repair the 
damage that was done to their masts because 
both ships had sent their carpenters to one of 

220 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

the other vessels which had been in need of a 
general overhauling and which was now lost. 
A month went by, and then they discovered that 
they had been driven back into the strait. The 
admiral discussed the situation with his chief 
officers. Did they advise going back to Hol- 
land without having accomplished anything, or 
would they keep on? The sailors all wanted to 
return to Holland. They did not have any 
faith left in the results of this unhappy voyage. 
Many of them were ill. Others pretended that 
they were too weak to work. Others mur- 
mured about a lack of provisions. There was 
ground for this talk. The supply-room was 
getting emptier and emptier in a very mysteri- 
ous way. At last the admiral decided to in- 
vestigate this strange case. He discovered that 
an unknown member of the crew possessed a 
key to the bread-boxes and stuffed himself 
every night while his comrades were kept on 
short rations. It was a gross breach of disci- 
pline. Apparently the expedition was going 
from bad to worse. On the afternoon of the 
tenth of December Admiral de Weert paid a 

221 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

call to the Trouwe to talk over the situation. 
The next morning the Trouwe had disappeared. 
De Weert never saw her again. He was all 




alone, and his safe return depended upon his 
own unaided efforts. His first duty was to get 
enough food. On a certain Sunday afternoon 
the few men of his ship who could still walk 
were on shore looking for things to eat when 
they had an encounter with a large number of 
natives who had just arrived in three canoes. 
The natives fled, and hid themselves among the 
cliffs. One woman and two small babies could 
not get away and were brought back to the 
ship. The woman was kept a prisoner for 
forty-eight hours while the Hollanders studied 

222 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

the habits and customs of the wild people of 
Tierra del Fuego. The subject of their study 
refused to eat cooked food, but dead birds 
which were thrown to her she ate as if she had 
been a wild animal. The children did the 
same thing, tearing at the feathers with their 
sharp teeth. After two days the mother and 
one of the children were sent back to the shore 
with a number of presents. The other child 
was kept on board and was taken back to Hol- 
land, where it died immediately after arrival. 
On the sixteenth of December a last attempt 




was made to find the Trouwe. A blank car- 
tridge was fired, and a few minutes later a dis- 
tant answer was heard. Soon a ship came sail- 

223 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

ing around a nearby cape. It was not the 
Trouwe, but the ship of Oliver van Noort, who 
at the head of his expedition had just entered 
upon the last stretch of his voyage through the 
strait. Van Noort had a story to tell of a fairly 
successful voyage, plenty to eat, and little ill- 
ness. The hungry men of De Weert looked 
with envy at the happy faces of Van Noort's 
sailors. The latter had just caught several 
thousand penguins on a little island not far 
away. The starving crew of the Geloof asked 
that they be allowed to sail to this island and 
catch whatever Van Noort had left alive. De 
Weert, however, refused this request. Here 
was his last chance to get to the Indies in the 
company of the squadron of Van Noort, and he 
meant to take it. The next morning he joined 
the new ships on their westward course. But 
his sailors, weak and miserable after more than 
a year of illness, could not obey their captain's 
commands as fast as those who were on the 
other ships. Soon the Geloof was left behind. 
The next morning, when Van Noort entered the 
Pacific, De Weert was helplessly blown back 

224 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

into the strait. It seemed impossible to do 
more than he had tried to accomplish against 
such great odds. He called all his remaining 
sailors together to hear what they wanted him 
to do. They all had just one wish, to get home 
as fast as possible by way of Brazil and Africa. 
The Pacific, so they argued, offered nothing but 
disappointment. De Weert promised to give 
his final decision on the next day, which was 
the first of January of the year 1600. When 
the morning came, he found himself once more 
in the company of other ships. Van Noort had 
reached the Pacific, but the Western storms had 
been too much for his strong ships. For the 
second time the Hollanders were all united in 
a cold little harbor inside the Strait of Ma- 
gellan. 

Van Noort now paid a personal visit to De 
Weert and asked what he could do to help him. 
De Weert was much obliged for this offer, and 
asked for bread enough to last him another four 
months. Unfortunately Van Noort could not 
do this. He had still a very long voyage before 
him, and did not dare to deprive his own men 

225 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

of their supplies. He advised De Weert to go 
to the island of the penguins and to fill his store- 
room with the dried meat of these birds. 
Meanwhile, much to his regret, he must leave 




De Weert as soon as possible, for he was in a 
hurry. 

The next day they said farewell to one an- 
other for the last time. De Weert took the 
precautions to leave instructions for the captain 
of the lost Trouwe. He wrote a letter which 
was placed inside a bottle, and this bottle was 
buried at the foot of a high tree. On the tree 
itself a board was hammered, and on this board 

226" 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

a message was painted telling in Dutch where 
to look for an important document at the foot 
of the tree. Then the ship sailed to the pen- 
guin island, and the thirty men who could do 
any work at all hunted the fat and lazy birds 
until they had killed several thousand. It was 
easy work. The penguins obligingly waited on 
their nests until they were killed. But the trip 
to the island almost destroyed the entire expe- 
dition. There was only one boat left, and in 
this boat the men who were not sick had rowed 
to the shore. They had been careless in fasten- 
ing her, and a sudden squall caught her and 
threw her on the rocks. She was badly damaged 
and could not be used without being repaired, 
but the men on shore had no tools with which 
to do any repairing, while those on the ship 
were so ill that they could not swim to the shore 
with the necessary hammers and saws. Two 
entire days were used to get that boat into order 
with the help of one ax and some pocket-knives, 
and during those two days the men lived out in 
the open on the cold shore and lived on raw 
penguin meat. 

227 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

The island, among other things, contained 
material evidences of Van Noort's presence. A 
dead native, with his hands tied behind his 
back, was found stretched out upon the sand. 
In a little hollow in the rocks they discovered 
a woman who had been wounded by a gunshot. 
They took good care of the woman, bandaged 
her wounds, and gave her a pocket-knife. To 
show her gratitude, she told De Weert of 
another island where there were even more pen- 
guins. The next week was spent on this island, 
and now the men had plenty of food. But the 
ship was without a single anchor and had only 
one leaking lifeboat. With the certainty that he 
could not land anywhere unless boats were sent 
for him from shore De Weert decided to return 
to the coast of Guinea and try to reach home. 
On the eighteenth of January the Geloof went 
back upon her track. Two months later the 
vessel reached the coast of Guinea. This trip 
back was not very eventful except for one small 
incident. One of the sailors who was a drunk- 
ard had broken into the storeroom and had stolen 
a lot of rice and several bottles of wine. Theft 

228 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

was one of the things which was punished most 
severely. Therefore, the man had been con- 
demned to death and was to be hanged. But 
while he was sitting in the rigging and waiting 
for somebody to push him into eternity the other 
members of the crew felt sorry for him and asked 
their captain to spare his life. At first he re- 
fused, but finally he agreed to show clemency if 
the men would never bother him again with a 
similar request. The prisoner was allowed to 
come down from his high perch, and to show his 
gratitude he broke again into the storeroom that 
same night. He was a very bad example. As 
such he was hanged from the yardarm of the 
highest mast, and his body was dropped into the 
sea. 

The crew, however, were so thoroughly de- 
moralized by this time that even such drastic 
measures did no good. They continued to pil- 
lage the storeroom, and when at last four of 
them had been detected and had been found 
guilty, their comrades were so weak that no- 
body could be found to hang the prisoners 
properly and they had to be taken home. 

229 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

In July of the year 1600 the Geloof reached 
the English Channel, and on the thirteenth of 
that month she entered the mouth of the Maas. 
There, within sight of home, one more sailor 
died. He was number sixty-nine. Only thirty- 
six men came back to Rotterdam. They were ill 




and had a story to tell of constant hardships and 
of terrible disappointments. The great expedi- 
tion of the two courageous merchants and all 
their investments were a complete loss. None 
of the other ships ever came back to Holland. 
But year after year stragglers from the other 
four ships reached home and told of the fate of 

230 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

the other three hundred sailors who had taken 
part in the unfortunate voyage. Some of these 
reports have come down to us, and we are able 
to give a short account of the adventures of each 
ship after that day early in the year 1600 when 
the Pacific storms had separated them from one 
another. 

First of all there was the Trouwe, which had 
remained faithful to De Weert after the other 
three vessels had disappeared. The wind had 
blown the Trouwe out of the strait into the 
Pacific Ocean. For many weeks her captain 
had lost all track of his whereabouts. Through 
sheer luck he had at last reached a coast which 
he supposed to be the continent of South Amer- 
ica and after a search of a few days he had found 
some natives who were friendly. The natives 
told the Hollanders that this was not the Ameri- 
can continent, but an island called Chiloe, sit- 
uated a few miles off the Chilean coast. The 
Dutch ships had been made welcome. They 
were invited to stay in the harbor as long as they 
wished. Meanwhile the natives told their cap- 
tain about a plan of their own which undoubt- 

231 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

edly would please him. It seemed that the in- 
habitants of Chiloe had good reason to hate the 
Spaniards, who were mighty on the near-by con- 
tinent and who recently had built a strong fort 
on the island, from which they exercised their 
tyrannical rule over all the natives and made 
them pay very heavy tribute. Perhaps, so the 
natives argued, the Hollanders could be induced 
to give their assistance in a campaign against 
the Spaniard. De Cordes, who commanded the 
Trouwe, was a Catholic, but he was quite ready 
to offer his services in so good a cause and was 
delighted to start a little private war of his own 
upon the Spaniards. He made ready to sail for 
that part of the coast where, according to his 
informants, the Spaniard had fortified himself. 
Meanwhile the natives were to proceed on shore 
toward the same Spanish fortress. An attack 
was to follow simultaneously from the land and 
the sea. On the way to the fortress all Span- 
ish houses and plantations, storerooms and 
churches, were burned down and at last the for- 
tress itself was reached. The commander of the 
fortress, however, had heard of the approach of 

232 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

this handful of Hollanders, and he sent them 
an insulting message telling them that he needed 
a new stable boy, anyway, and would bestow 
this high office upon the Dutch captain as soon 
as he could have the necessary arrangements 
made. But when the Dutch captain actually 
appeared upon the scene with a well-armed ves- 
sel and a band of native auxiliaries and informed 
the Spaniard that the new stable boy had come 
to take possession of his domain, the commander 
changed his mind and offered the Hollanders 
whatever they wished if they would only leave 
him alone. De Cordes, however, attacked the 
fort at once. He took it, and the garrison was 
locked up in the church as prisoners. Then the 
Chilean natives in their rage attacked the church 
and killed several of the Spaniards. This was 
not what De Cordes wanted to be done. He 
did not mind if a Hollander killed a Spaniard, 
but it did not look well for one white man to 
allow a native to kill another while he himself 
stood by. Therefore he returned their arms to 
the Spaniards and together they then drove the 
natives away. When the natives, however, told 

233 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

the Dutch sailors that the fort contained hidden 
treasures of which the Spaniards had made no 
mention, the former allies attacked each other 
for the second time, and the Spanish prisoners 
were sent on board the Dutch ship. The story 
which we possess of this episode of the voyage is 
not very clear. It was written many years later 
by one of the few sailors who came back to Hol- 
land. His account of these adventures was so 
badly printed and the spelling of the original 
pamphlet was so extraordinary that a second 
scribe was later hired to turn the booklet into 
more or less readable Dutch. The present 
translation has been made from this second ver- 
sion. Everything is a bit mixed, and it is not 
easy to find out what really happened. A com- 
mon and ignorant sailor of the year 1600 was not 
very different from the same sort of fellow who 
at present is fighting in the European war. 
They both remember events in chunks, so to 
speak. They have very vivid impressions of a 
few occurrences, but they have forgotten other 
things of more importance because at the time 
these did not strike their unobservant brain as 

234 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

being of any special interest. But we have no 
other account of the adventures of the Trouwe. 
We must use this information such as it is. 




The booty found in this small settlement 
had not been of great value. The expedition 
felt inclined to move toward a richer port. 
They did not have food enough for their prison- 
ers, and fourteen of the nineteen Spaniards who 
were locked up in the hold were thrown over- 
board. This sounds very cruel, but it was the 
custom of the time that these two nations rarely 

235 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

gave each other quarter. Whosoever was made 
a prisoner was killed. The Spaniards started 
this practice in the middle of the sixteenth cen- 
tury because the Hollanders as heretics deserved 
no better fate. The Hollanders reciprocated. 
On this distant island of the Pacific both parties 
obeyed the unwritten law. The Hollanders 
drowned their prisoners. When Spanish rein- 
forcements reached Chiloe and retook the fort, 
they killed the Dutch garrison, for such was the 
custom of the time. 

The Trouwe after this famous exploit was in 
a difficult position, all alone in the heart of the 
Pacific, with enemies on every side and a bad 
conscience. The idea of attacking some other 
Spanish harbor in Chile and Peru was given up 
as too dangerous. Near the harbor of Truxillo 
a Spanish ship loaded with grain and wine was 
captured, and provided with new supplies, De 
Cordes decided to risk the trip across the Pacific. 
On the third of January, 1601, he reached Ter- 
nate in the Indies, where Van Noort had been 
the year before, and where they found a Dutch 
settlement commanded by that same Van der 

236 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

Does whose account of Houtman's first trip to 
India we have given in the fourth chapter of 
this little book. Van der Does warned De 
Cordes not to visit the next island of Tidore. 
There were only twenty-four Hollanders left on 
board the Trouwe. It was too dangerous to 
visit an unfriendly Portuguese colony with a 
damaged ship and so small a crew. But De 
Cordes, who seems to have been a reckless sort 
of person, went to Tidore all the same. Much 
to his surprise he was very cordially received 
by the commander of the Portuguese garrison 
and the governor of the town. They both as- 
sured him that he might trade in their col- 
ony as much as he wished. If, however, he 
would let them know what he wished to buy, 
they would give orders that provisions and a 
cargo of spice should be got ready for their dis- 
tinguished visitors. They invited him to come 
on shore the next morning. They wanted to 
make him a present of an ox for the benefit of 
his hungry crew and entertain him personally, 
and, then after a few more days further arrange- 
ments for the purpose of a mutually profitable 

237 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

trade might be made. The next morning the 
Dutch captain and six men went ashore to get 
their ox. The ship itself was left in the care of 
the first mate. Soon a Portuguese boat rowed 
out to the Trouwe and asked the mate to come 
on shore, too, and have breakfast with his Portu- 
guese colleagues. The mate was suspicious and 
refused the invitation. He suggested that the 
Portuguese officer come on board the Trouwe 
and breakfast with him. But the officer said 
that he was too heavy a man to climb on board 
so high a ship, and he did not care to take this 
exercise so early in the morning. So the mate 
left the ship, together with the ship's carpenter, 
to see what a Portuguese kitchen served for 
breakfast. The moment the two men landed a 
loud outcry was heard from the Trouwe. The 
mate at once jumped into the sea and looked for 
his comrade. The carpenter was dead and his 
head, hacked from his body, was used as a foot- 
ball by the Portuguese. The mate swam out to 
the ship, but when he reached it he found that 
the Portuguese had jumped on board the mo- 

238 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

ment he had left for his breakfast party. He 
swam back to the shore, was made a prisoner, 
and was locked up in the fortress. With six 
other men he escaped the general murder which 
had taken place as soon as he landed. De Cor- 
des himself had been killed with a dagger. The 
six men who had accompanied him on shore had 
heard the noise of the attack upon the Trouwe 
and had rowed away from shore in a boat, try- 
ing to get back to their vessel. But the Trouwe 
was already in the hands of the Portuguese, and 
since the Hollanders had no arms, they sur- 
rendered after the Portuguese had given their 
oath not to hurt them and to spare their lives. 
They were taken on board a Portuguese ship. 
As soon as they were on deck they had been 
placed in a row, and a soldier had been ordered 
to take his sword and hack their heads off. He 
had killed four men when the other two man- 
aged to jump overboard. One of these was 
drowned. The other was fished out of the water 
and was sent to the fortress with the mate and 
five sailors who had put up such a desperate 

239 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

fight on board the Trouwe that the Portuguese 
had promised to treat them with clemency if 
only they would surrender. 

The six men were afterward taken to Goa. 
Gradually one after the other they had managed 
to escape and find their way back to Holland. 
Two of them returned to Rotterdam in the au- 
tumn of 1603. Another one we find mentioned 
in later years as commander of an Indian trader. 
As for the Trouwe, Van Neck on his second 
voyage to India found the vessel being used by 
the Portuguese as a man-of-war. 

Of the other ships, the Blyde Boodschap also 
had a very sad career and met with extraordinary 
adventures. This small vessel was commanded 
by a certain Dirck Gerritsz, a native of Enk- 
huizen, a fellow-citizen of Linschoten. As a 
matter of fact the two men had heard of each 
other many years before. While Linschoten 
was in Goa he was told of a Hollander who was 
a native of his own city and who had traveled not 
only in the Indies, but who also had visited 
Japan and China. We know very little of the 
man. Some information of his travels in Asia 

240 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

have been printed in a general hand-book on 
navigation of that time, though he did not follow 
Linschoten's example and print a full account 
of his adventures. When the city of Rotterdam 
sent this expedition to the Strait of Magellan, 
Dirck Gerritsz had been engaged as first mate 
of the Blyde Boodschap. When her captain 
died he had succeeded him. The ship of Ger- 
ritsz had suffered from the same storm which 
had driven the Trouive out of her course. An 
attempt had been made to reach the island of 
Santa Maria, but the maps on board proved to 
be faulty, and the little island could not be 
found. With only provisions enough for 
another week Gerritsz had finally reached the 
harbor of Valparaiso. Of his original crew of 
fifty-six men, twenty-three were left, and of 
these only nine were strong enough to sail the 
ship. Therefore he had been forced to sur- 
render himself and his vessel to the Spaniards. 
The Dutch sailors were forced to take service 
in the Spanish navy. From that moment on we 
lose sight of all of them. A few reached home 
after many years of strange adventure. Others 

241 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

died in the Spanish service. Of the fate of the 
ship we know nothing. As for Dirck Gerritsz, 
rumor has it that he found his way back to 
Enkhuizen. 

There were two other ships, the Hoop and the 
Liefde. Of these the Liefde had reached Santa 
Maria, and after leaving the island had landed 
at Punta Lapavia, where an attempt had been 
made to find fresh water. Unfortunately, the 
captain and twenty-three of his men had been 
murdered by natives who mistook them for 
Spaniards and had carried their heads in 
triumph to the Spanish town of Concepcion, 
where they were shown to the garrison as a 
promise of what was in store for them should the 
settlement ever fall into the hands of the en- 
raged native population. The rest of the sailors 
had saved their ship by fleeing to Santa Maria, 
where they met the Hoop. The Hoop had suf- 
fered a similar calamity. Her captain and 
twenty-seven of his men had been murdered on 
another island. Of the officers of both ships 
hardly a single one was still alive. 

New officers were elected from among the 
242 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

men, and the ships continued their northward 
course apparently without a definite idea of what 
they intended to do. They could not go back 
through the strait, and they were obliged to 
cross the Pacific. They decided to avoid all 
Spanish and Portuguese settlements and to make 
for Japan, where they might be able to sell their 
cargo, and where a peaceful couple of ships 
might find it possible to do some honest trading 
without being attacked by wild natives or lying 
Spaniards. On the twenty-seventh of Novem- 
ber the island of Santa Maria was left, and soon 
the ships passed the equator. They kept near 
the land, and lost eight more of their men when 
these had gone to the shore to get fresh water 
and were attacked by natives. On the twenty- 
third of February, during a gale, the ships were 
separated from each other. The Liefde was 
obliged to make the voyage to Japan alone. On 
the twenty-fourth of March of the year 1600 the 
first Japanese island was reached. 

The people of Japan were very kind-hearted 
and very obliging. The sick Hollanders were 
allowed to come on shore, and the others could 

243 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

trade as much as they liked. But Japan for 
many years had been a field of successful activi- 
ties for Portuguese Jesuits. These Jesuits 
smiled pleasantly upon the Dutch visitors, but 
to the Japanese they hinted that the Hollanders 
were pirates and could not be trusted. Holland 
was not a country at all, and these men were all 
robbers and thieves. They advised the Japa- 
nese authorities to let these dangerous people 
starve or send them away from their island, 
which would mean the same thing. But the 
news of the arrival of some strange ships had 
reached the ears of the Emperor of Japan. He 
sent for some of the crew to come to his court. 
An Englishman among the sailors by the name 
of William Adams was chosen for this danger- 
ous mission. He not only represented to his im- 
perial Majesty the sad state of affairs among the 
shipwrecked Hollanders, but he made himself 
so useful at the imperial court that he was asked 
to remain behind and serve the Japanese state. 
He had a wife and children at home in England, 
but he liked this new country so well that he 
decided to stay. He lived happily for twenty 

244 



ATTACK UPON COAST OF AMERICA 

years, married a Japanese woman, and when he 
died in 1620 divided his fortune equally among 
his Japanese and his English families. 

Without the assistance of Adams, who seems 
to have been the leader of the remaining sailors 
on the Liefde, it was impossible to accomplish 
anything with the big ship. Of the twenty-four 
men who had reached Japan only eighteen were 
left. The ship, therefore, was deserted, and 
all the men went on shore. Except for two, the 
others all disappeared from view. They prob- 
ably settled down in Japan. But in the year 
1605, in the month of December, two Holland- 
ers came to the Dutch settlement of Patani, on 
the Indian peninsula. They had made the voy- 
age from Japan to India on a Japanese ship, and 
they brought to the Dutch company trading in 
that region an official invitation from the Em- 
peror of Japan asking them to come and enter 
into honorable commerce with the Japanese is- 
lands. This invitation was accepted. In the 
year 1608 one of the two Dutch messengers re- 
turned to Japan with letters announcing the ar- 
rival of a Dutch fleet for the next summer. He 

245 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

continued to live in Japan until his death in 
1634. The other sailor found a chance to go 
back to Holland on a Dutch ship, but near home 
he was killed in a quarrel with some Portuguese. 
The net result of this unfortunate voyage of the 
Liefde was the establishment of a very useful 
trade relation with Japan — a relation which be- 
came more important after the Portuguese had 
been expelled, and which lasted for over two 
centuries. 

Finally there was the ship called the Hoop, 
which had become separated from the Liefde on 
the coast of South America in February of the 
year 1600. It went down to the bottom of the 
ocean with everybody on board. 



246 



THE BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN 
BONTEKOE 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN 
BONTEKOE 

CAPTAIN BONTEKOE was a pious 
man who sailed the ocean in com- 
mand of several Dutch ships during 
the early part of the seventeenth century. He 
never did anything remarkable as a navigator, 
he never discovered a new continent or a new 
strait or even a new species of bird but he was 
blown up with his ship, flew heavenward, landed 
in the ocean, and survived this experience to tell 
a tale of such harrowing bad luck that the com- 
passionate world read his story for over three 
centuries with tearful eyes. Wherefore we shall 
copy as much as is desirable from his famous 
diary, which was published in the year 1647. 

On the twenty-eighth of December of the 
year 161 8, William Ysbrantsz Bontekoe, with a 

249 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

ship of 550 ton and 206 men, left the roads of 
Texel for India. The name of the vessel was 
the Nieuw Hoorn, and it was loaded with gun- 
powder. Kindly remember that gunpowder. 
There were the usual storms, the usual broken 
masts; the customary number of sick sailors 
either died or recovered; the customary route 
along the coast of Africa was followed. The 
weather, once the cape was left behind, was fine, 
and a short stay on the island of Reunion al- 
lowed the sick to regain their health and the 
dead to be buried. The natives were well dis- 
posed and traded with Bontekoe. They enter- 
tained him and danced for the amusement of 
his men, and everything was as happy as could 
be. 

At last the voyage across the Indian Ocean 
was started under the best of auspices, and the 
Nieuw Hoorn had almost reached the Strait of 
Sunda when the great calamity occurred. On 
the nineteenth of November, almost a year, 
therefore, after the ship had left Holland, one 
of the pantrymen went into the hold to get him- 
self some brandy. It was very dark in the hold, 

251 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

and therefore he had taken a candle with him. 
This candle, in a short iron holder, with a sharp 
point to it, he stuck into a barrel which was on 
top of the one out of which he filled his bottle. 
When he got through with his job he jerked the 
iron candlestick out of the wood of the barrel. 
In doing so a small piece of burning tallow fell 
into the brandy. That caused an explosion, and 
the next moment the brandy inside the barrel 
had caught fire. Fortunately there were two 
pails of water standing near by, and the fire was 
easily extinguished. A lot more water was 
pumped upon the dangerous barrels, and the 
fire, as far as anybody could see or smell, had 
been put out. But half an hour later the dread- 
ful cry of "Fire!" was heard once more all 
through the ship. This time the coals which 
were in the hold near the brandy, and which 
were used for the kitchen stove and the black- 
smith shop, had caught fire. They filled the 
hold with poisonous gas and a thick and yellow- 
ish smoke. For the second time the pumps were 
set to work to fill the hold with water. But the 
air inside the hold was so bad that the firemen 

252 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

had a difficult task. As the hours went by the 
fire grew worse. Bontekoe proposed to throw 
his cargo of gunpowder overboard. But as I 
have related in my first chapters, there always 




was a civilian commander on board such Indian 
vessels. It was his duty to look after the cargo 
and to represent the commercial interest of the 
company. Bontekoe's civilian master did not 
wish to lose his valuable gunpowder. He told 
the captain to leave it where it was and try to 
put out the fire. Bontekoe obeyed, but soon his 
men could no longer stand the smoke in the hold. 
Large holes were then hacked through the deck 
and through these water was poured upon the 
cargo. Now Bontekoe was a pious man, but he 
was neither very strong of character nor very 

253 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

resourceful of mind. He spent his time in run- 
ning about the ship giving many orders, the ma- 
jority of which were to no great purpose. 
Meanwhile he did not notice that part of the 
crew, from fear of being blown up, had lowered 
the boats and were getting ready to leave the 
ship. The civilian director, who had just told 
the captain to save the gunpowder, had been the 
first to join in the flight. He was soon safely 
riding the waves in a small boat far away from 
the doomed ship. 

For those who had been deserted on board 
there was only one way to salvation; they must 
try to, put out the fire or be killed. Under per- 
sonal command of their captain they set to work 
and pumped and pumped and pumped. But 
the fire had reached several barrels of oil, and 
there was a dense smoke. It was impossible to 
throw 310 barrels of powder overboard in the 
suffocating atmosphere of the hold, yet the men 
tried to do it. They worked with desperate 
speed, but before the sixth part of the dangerous 
cargo was in the waters of the ocean the fire 
reached the forward part, where the powder 

254 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

was stored. A few moments later one hundred 
and ninety men were blown skyward, together 
with pieces of the masts and pieces of the ship 
and heavy iron bars and pieces of sail and every- 








thing that belongs to a well-equipped vessel. 
"And I, Captain Willem Ysbrantsz Bontekoe, 
commander of the ship, also flew through the 
sky, and I thought that my end had come. So I 
stretched my hands and arms toward heaven 
and said : 'O dear Lord, there I go ! Please have 
pity upon this miserable sinner!' because I 
thought that now the next moment I must be 
dead; but all the time I was flying through the 
air I kept my mind clear, and I found that there 
was happiness in my heart; yes, I even found 

255 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

that I was quite gay, and so came down again, 
and landed in the water between pieces of the 
ship which had been blown into little scraps." 

This is the captain's own minute account of 
the psychology of being blown up. He con- 
tinues : 

"And when I was now once in the water of 
the sea, I felt my courage return in such a way 
that it was as if I had become a new man. And 
when I looked around I found a piece of the 
mainmast floating at my side, and so I climbed 
on top of it, and looking over the scene around 
me, I said, 'O Lord, so hath this fine ship been 
destroyed even as Sodom and Gomorrah.' " 

For a short while the skipper floated and con- 
templated upon his mast, and then he noticed 
that he was no longer alone. A young German 
who had been on board as a common sailor came 
swimming to the wreckage. He climbed on 
the only piece of the ship's stern that was afloat, 
and pulling the captain's mast nearer to him 
with a long stick which he had fished out of 
the water, he helped our good Bontekoe to pull 
himself on board his wreckage. There they 

256 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

were together on the lonely ocean on a few 
boards and with no prospect of rescue. Both 
the boats were far away, and showed themselves 
only as small black dots upon the distant hori- 
zon. Bontekoe told his comrade to pray with 
him. For a long time they whispered their sup- 
plications to heaven. Then they looked once 
more to see what the boats were doing. And 
behold! their prayer had been answered. The 
boats came rowing back as fast as they could. 
When they saw the two men they tried to reach 




the wreckage ; but they did not dare to come too 
near for their heavily loaded boats ran the risk 
of being thrown against the remains of the hulk. 
In that case they would have been swamped. 

257 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Bontekoe had felt very happy as long as he had 
been up in the air. Now, however, he began to 
notice that he had hurt his back badly and that 
he had been wounded in the head. He did not 
dare to swim to the boats, but the bugler of the 
ship, who was in the first boat, swam back to 
the wreckage, fastened a rope around Bonte- 
koe's waist, and in this fashion the commander 
was pulled safely on board, where he was made 
as comfortable as could be. During the night 
the two boats remained near the place of the 
misfortune because they hoped that they might 
find a few things to eat in the morning. They 
had only a little bread and no water at all. 

Meanwhile the exhausted skipper slept, and 
when in the morning his men told him that they 
had nothing to eat he was very angry, for the 
day before the sea around his mast had been full 
of all sorts of boxes and barrels and there had 
been enough to eat for everybody. During the 
night, however, the boats had been blown away 
from the wreckage by the wind. There was no 
chance to get anything at all. Eight pounds of 
bread made up the total amount of provisions 

258 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 




for seventy strong men. Of these there were 
forty-six in one and twenty-six in the second boat. 
Part of that bread was used by the ship's doctor 
to make a plaster for Bontekoe's wounds. With 
the help of a pillow which had been found in 
the locker of the biggest boat and which he wore 
around his head, Bontekoe was then partly re- 
stored to life, and he took command of his 
squadron and decided what ought to be done. 
There were masts in the boat, but the sails had 
been forgotten. Therefore he ordered the men 
to give up their shirts. Out of these, two large 
sails were made. They were primitive sails, 
but they caught the breeze, and with the help 
of the western wind Bontekoe hoped to reach 
the coast of Sumatra, which, according to the 
best guess of all those on board, must be seventy 
miles to the east. All those who had the map 

259 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

of that part of India fairly well in their heads 
were consulted, and upon a piece of wood a 
chart of the coast of Sumatra, the Sunda Islands, 
and the west coast of Java was neatly engraved 
with the help of a nail and a pocket-knife. A 




few simple instruments were cut out of old 
planks, and the curious expedition was ready to 
navigate further eastward. 

Fortunately it rained very hard during the 
first night. The sails made out of shirts were 
used to catch the rain, and the water was care- 
fully saved in two small empty barrels which 
had been found in one of the two boats. A 
drinking-cup was cut out of a wooden stopper, 
and each of the sailors in turn got a few drops 
of water. For many hours they sailed, and they 
became dreadfully hungry. Again a merciful 

260 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

Heaven came to their assistance. A number of 
sea-gulls came flying around the boats, and many 
of them ventured so near that they seemed to 
say "Please catch us." Of course they were 
caught and killed, and although there was no 




way of cooking them, they were eaten by the 
hungry men as fast as they came. But a sea- 
gull is not a very fat bird, and again there was 
hunger, and not yet any sight of land. The big 
boat was a good sailor, but the small one could 
not keep up with her. Therefore the men in 
the small boat asked that they might be taken on 

261 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

board the big one, so that they might either per- 
ish together or all be saved. The sailors in the 
large boat did not like the idea. They feared 
that their boat could not hold all of the seventy- 
six men. After a while, however, they gave in. 
The men from the small boat were taken on 
board. Out of the extra oars a sort of deck was 
rigged up on top of the boat, and under this a 
number of the men were allowed to sleep while 
the others sat on top and looked for land or 
prayed for food and water. 

No further sea-gulls came to feed this forlorn 
expedition, but just when they were so hungry 
that they could not stand it any longer, large 
shoals of flying-fish suddenly jumped out of the 
water into the boats. Again the men were 
saved. The two little barrels of water had been 
emptied by this time. For the second time the 
men expected that they would all perish. They 
sailed eastward, but they saw no land, and finally 
they got so hungry and thirsty that they talked 
about killing the cabin boy and eating him. 
Bontekoe asked them please not to do it, and he 
prayed the good Lord not to allow this horrible 

262 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

thing to happen. The men, however, said that 
they were very hungry and must have some- 
thing to eat. Then he asked that they should 
wait just three days more. If no land was seen 
after three days, they might eat the cabin boy. 

On the thirteenth day after the explosion there 
was a severe thunder-storm, and the barrels were 
filled with fresh water. Most of the men then 
crept under the little cover to be out of the rain, 
and only one of the mates was left on deck. It 
was very hazy, but when the fog parted for a 
moment he saw land very near the boat. The 
next morning the survivors reached an uninhab- 
ited island, where there was no fresh water, but 
an abundance of cocoanut-trees. The men at- 
tacked these cocoanuts with such greedy hunger 
and they drank the sap with such haste that on 
the succeeding day they were all very ill, with 
great pains and a feeling that they might explode 
at any moment just as their ship had done. 

From the presence of this island Bontekoe 
argued that the coast of Sumatra must be about 
fifteen miles distant. He filled the boat with 
many cocoanuts, a wonderful fruit because it is 

263 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

food and drink at the same time, and sailed 
farther eastward. After seventy hours he ac- 
tually reached Sumatra, but the surf did not al- 
low him to land at once. It took an entire day 
before his men managed to row through that ter- 
rible surf, and then only at the cost of a swamped 
boat. At last, however, they did reach the 
shore, bailed out their boat, and made a fire to 
dry their clothes and to rest from the fatigue of 
this terrible experience. Some of the sailors 
meanwhile explored the country near by, and 
to their great astonishment they found the ashes 
of an old fire and near it some tobacco. This 
was very welcome, for the men had not smoked 
for many weeks. They also found some beans. 
These they ate so greedily that they were all ill, 
and in the middle of the night, when they lay 
around groaning and moaning, they were sud- 
denly attacked by the natives of the island. 
They had no arms, but they defended themselves 
as well as possible with sticks and pieces of burn- 
ing wood which they picked up out of the fire. 
The natives fled, and the next morning sent three 
messengers to have a talk with the shipwrecked 

264 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

Hollanders. They wanted to know why he and 
his men had come to their island. They were 
told the story of the burning ship and the explo- 
sion which had killed many of the other sailors. 
Bontekoe said that he was a peaceful traveler, 
and would pay for everything he bought. The 
natives believed this story, and came back with 
chickens and rice and all sorts of eatables, for 
which Bontekoe paid with money. The natives 
then told him that this land was Sumatra and 
that Java was a little farther to the east. They 
even knew the name of the governor-general, 
and Bontekoe now felt certain that he was on 
the right road to a Dutch harbor. 

Before he left he made a little trip up the river 
to buy more food, for he counted upon a long 
voyage in the small boat. This visit almost cost 
him his life. One day he had bought a carabao. 
He had paid for the animal, and told the four 
sailors who were with him to bring it to the 
camp; but the carabao was so wild that they 
could not manage it. The four sailors decided 
to spend the night in the village and try their 
luck once more the next morning. Bontekoe 

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DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

thought that this was too dangerous, and when 
his men refused to return to join the others, he 
hired two natives to paddle him back in their 
own canoe. The natives told him the price for 




which they would row him back to the camp, 
and he gave them the required sum; but when 
they were out in the middle of the river they 
threatened to kill Bontekoe unless he gave them 
more money. Bontekoe said a short prayer and 
felt very uncomfortable. Then he heard a 
voice inside himself tell him to sing a funny song. 

266 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

This he did. He sang so loud that the noise 
resounded through the quiet forests on both sides 
of the river. The two natives thought that this 
was the funniest thing that they had ever heard, 
and they laughed so uproariously that they for- 
got all about their plan to kill the white man, 
and Bontekoe came safely back to his own 
people. 

The next morning a number of natives ap- 
peared with a carabao, but Bontekoe saw at once 
that it was not the same one that he had bought 
the day before. He asked about it, and wanted 
to know where his men were. "Oh," the natives 
said, "they are lazy and they will come a little 
later." This looked suspicious, but whatever 
happened, Bontekoe must have his carabao to 
be eaten on the trip across the Strait of Sunda. 
Therefore he tried to kill the animal, but when 
they saw this the natives suddenly began to call 
him names and they shrieked until several hun- 
dred others came running from the bushes and 
attacked the Hollanders. These fled back to 
their boat, but before they could reach it eleven 
men had been killed. Of those who scrambled 

267 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

on board one had been hit in the stomach with 
a poisoned arrow. Bontekoe performed an 
operation, trying to cut away the flesh around 
the wound, but he did not succeed in saving the 
life of the poor fellow. There were now only 
fifty-six men left. 

With only eight chickens for so many men 
Bontekoe did not dare to cross the strait. The 
next morning, armed, he went on shore, and, hav- 
ing gathered a lot of clams and filled the small 
barrels with fresh water, sailed away for the 
coast of Java. They sailed all day long, but at 
night there came so violent a wind that the 
sails had to be taken down, and the boat drifted 
whither it pleased the good Lord to send it. It 
pleased Him to bring it the next morning near 
three small islands densely covered with palm- 
trees. Out of the bamboo which grew near the 
shore several water-barrels were improvised. 
There was still some food, but not much. 
Therefore the discovery of these islands did not 
bring much relief to the poor shipwrecked peo- 
ple. Bontekoe wandered about in a despondent 
mood, and when he saw a small hill he climbed 

268 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 




to the top of it to be alone and to pray to the good 
Lord for his divine counsel. He prayed for a 
long time, and when at last he opened his eyes 
he saw that the clouds on the horizon had parted 
and that there was more land in the distance, 
and out of this he saw two bluish-looking moun- 
tains lifting their peaks. Suddenly he re- 
membered that his friend, Captain Schouten, 
who had been in those parts of India, had often 
told him of two strange blue mountains which 
he had often seen in Java. He had sailed across 
the sea which separated Sumatra from Java, and 
the island on which he and his men now were 
was a little island off the coast of Java. He 
knew his way now, and he ordered his men to 
row as fast as they could. A boy was told to 
climb the mast and keep watch. And, behold! 
the next day the sailors suddenly saw a large 

269 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Dutch fleet of twenty-three ships, under Fred- 
erik Houtman, who had left Texel with Bonte- 
koe and was on his way to Batavia. He took all 
the men on board his ships. He fed them, gave 
them clothes, and carried them to Batavia, 
the newly founded capital of the Dutch East 
Indies, where the governor general, one Jan 
Pieterszoon Coen, received them very kindly, 
and appointed Bontekoe to be captain of a new 
ship, of thirty-two guns, which plied between 
the different colonies and carried provisions and 
supplies of war from Java to the other colonies. 
It also brought to Java the granite which was 
necessary to build the strong fort where the gov- 
ernment of the colony was to reside. Later on 
Bontekoe was made captain of another ship 
called the Groningen, and he visited China, 
where the Dutch company tried to capture the 
Portuguese colony in Macao and to build a fort 
on one of the Pescadores Islands to protect their 
Chinese trade. 

After two years of this work Bontekoe wanted 
to return home, and he asked to be given the 
command of a ship that was about to leave for 

270 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

Holland. He was given command of the Hol- 
landia, which with two other ships left Batavia 
on the sixth of February of the year of our Lord 
1625. But Bontekoe's bad luck had not yet 
come to an end. This patient man, who never 
lost his temper and accepted everything that 
happened to him with devout resignation, once 
more became the victim of all sorts of unfortu- 
nate occurrences. On the nineteenth of March 
his ship was attacked by a terrible storm, and 
soon the waves threatened to swamp the vessel. 
Bontekoe ordered the men to work the pumps 
as hard as they could. Then the pepper stowed 
away in the hold broke loose, got into the 
pumps and clogged them. Finally baskets were 
placed about the lower part of the pumps to keep 
the pernicious pepper out of them, and the Hol- 
landia was saved. 

Of the other two ships, one, the Gouda, had 
disappeared when the morning came, and the 
other, the Middelburg, had suffered much. 
Her masts were broken, and they had no spare 
the Atlantic. Finally the Middelburg left 
part of his spare yards for masts, and then he 

271 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

sailed with all possible haste for Madagascar to 
repair his own damage. He reached the island 
inside a week, and cut himself a mast out of a 
tree. He repaired his ship and spent a month 




on the island, where he was well received by 
the natives, who flocked from all over to see how 
the Hollanders made a new ship out of the 
wreck which they had saved from the storm. 
Here Bontekoe waited for the other ships. But 
the Gouda had sunk, and the other, the Middel- 
burg, reached Madagascar much later, and spent 
several months in the bay of Antongil. Most of 

272 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

her people were ill and among those who died 
on the island was the commander of the ship, 
Willem Schouten, who with Le Maire had 
discovered the new route between the Pacific 
and the Atlantic. Finally the Middleburg left 
Madagascar and sailed to St. Helena. There 
she got into a fight with two Portuguese vessels, 
and that is the last word word we have ever re- 
ceived of her. As for Bontekoe, he, too, reached 
St. Helena, where he wanted to take in fresh 
water. But a Spanish ship had landed troops, 
and he was not allowed to come on shore. So 
he went farther on, and at last reached Kinsale 
in Ireland. This time the joys of life on land 
almost finished the brave captain who so often 
had escaped the anger of the waves. His sail- 
ors went on shore, and after the long voyage 
they appreciated the hospitality of the Irish 
inns so well that they refused to come back on 
board. They stayed on shore until the mayor 
of the city, at the request of Bontekoe, forbade 
the owners of ale-houses to give the Hollanders 
more than seven shillings' credit apiece. As 
soon as this was known the men, many of whom 

273 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

had spent much more than that, hastened back 
to their ship. Crowds of furious innkeepers 
and their wives, crying aloud for their money, 
followed them. 

Good Captain Bontekoe paid everybody what 
he or she had a right to ask, and finally, on the 
twenty- fifth of November of the year 1625, he 
reached home. Bontekoe went to live quietly 
in his native city of Hoorn. He had written a 
short account of his voyage, but he had never 
printed it because he did not think that he 
could write well enough. But one of his fellow- 
townsmen wanted to write a large volume upon 
the noble deeds of the people of Hoorn, and he 
asked Bontekoe to write down the main events 
of his famous voyage, and he promised to edit 
the little book for the benefit of the reading 
public. 

And behold! this same public, saturated with 
stories of wild men and wild animals and ter- 
rible storms and uninhabited islands and treach- 
erous Portuguese and hairbreadth escapes, took 
such a fancy to the simple recital of Bontekoe's 
pious trip toward heaven and the patience with 

274 



BAD LUCK OF CAPTAIN BONTEKOE 

which he had accepted the vicissitudes of life 
that they read his little book long after the more 
ponderous volumes had been left to the kind 
ministrations of the meritorious book-worm. 



275 



SCHOUTEN AND LE MAIRE 
DISCOVER A NEW STRAIT 



CHAPTER IX 

SCHOUTEN AND LE MAIRE 
DISCOVER A NEW STRAIT 

THIS is the story of a voyage to a coun- 
try which did not exist. The men 
who risked their capital in this expedi- 
tion hoped to reach a territory which we now 
call Australia. It was not exactly the Australia 
which we know from our modern geography. 
It was a mysterious continent of which there had 
been heard many rumors for more than half 
a century. What the contemporary traveler 
really hoped to find we do not know, but we 
have the details of an expedition to this new land 
called "Terra Australis incognita" or "the un- 
known southern land," an expedition which left 
the harbor of Hoorn on the fifteenth of June of 
the year 1615. 

Hoorn is a little city on the Zuyder Zee, just 
279 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

such a little city as Enkhuizen, from which Lin- 
schoten had set out upon his memorable voyage. 
This voyage had a short preface which has little 
to do with navigation, but much with provincial 
politics and commercial rivalry. The original 
idea of allowing everybody to found his own 
little Indian trading company after his own 
wishes had been a bad one from an economic 
point of view. There was so much competition 
between the three dozen little companies that all 
were threatened with bankruptcy. Therefore 
a financial genius, the eminent leader of the 
province of Holland, John of Barneveldt, took 
matters into his own capable hands and com- 
bined all the little companies into one large East 
India Trading Company, a commercial body 
which existed until the year 1795 and was a 
great success from start to finish. 

Among the original investors there had been 
a certain Jacques le Maire, a native of the town 
of Antwerp who had fled when the Spaniards 
took that city for the second time, and who now 
lived in Amsterdam with his wife and his 
twenty-two children. He was respected for 

280 



A NEW STRAIT 

his ability, and was chosen into the body of direc- 
tors who managed the affairs of the East India 
Company. But Le Maire was not the sort of 
man to stay in the harness with others for a very 




long time. He complained that the company 
cared only for dividends and immediate profits. 
He wanted to see the ships of his adopted country 
make war upon the Spaniards, besides trying to 
steal their colonies. 

After a few years Le Maire quarreled openly 
with several of the other directors, and he 
planned to form an Indian company of his own. 

281 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

In Amsterdam, however, he was so strongly op- 
posed by his enemies, who were still in the old 
company, that he was forced to leave the city. 
He went to live in a small village near by and 
continued to work upon his schemes. With 
Hendrik Hudson he discussed a plan of reach- 
ing the Indies by way of the Northwestern 
Route — a route which was as yet untried. To 
King Henry IV of France he made the offer of 
establishing a new French company as a rival 
of the mighty Dutch institution. All these 
many ideas came to nothing. Henry IV was 
murdered, and Hudson went into the service of 
another employer. 

Le Maire was obliged to invent something 
new. He was in a very difficult position. The 
Estates General of the Dutch Republic had given 
to their one East India Company a practical 
monopoly of the entire Indian trade. They de- 
cided that no Dutch ships should be allowed to 
travel to the Indies except through the Strait of 
Magellan or by way of the Cape of Good Hope. 
That meant that the entrance to the Indian spice 
islands was closed at both sides. It was of 

282 



A NEW STRAIT 

course easy enough to sail through the strait or 
past the cape. There was nobody to prevent one 
from doing so. But when one tried to trade in 
India on his own account, the Dutch company 
sent their men-of-war after the intruder. These 
wanted to know who he was and how he came 




within the domain of the company. Since there 
were only two roads, he must have trespassed in 
one way or the other upon the privileges of the 
company. Therefore the company, which was 
the sovereign ruler of all the Indian islands, had 
the right to confiscate his ships. 

If Le Maire could only find a new road to In- 
dia, he would not interfere with the strict rules 
of the Estates General. His ships could then 
trade in the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean, 

283 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

and he would be the most dangerous rival of the 
old company, which he had learned to hate since 
the days when he had first invested sixty thou- 
sand guilders and had been one of the directors. 
For a long time Le Maire studied books and 
maps and atlases, and finally came to the conclu- 
sion that there must be another way of getting 
from the Atlantic into the Pacific besides the long 
and tortuous Strait of Magellan. And if there 
were a strait, there must be land on the other 
side of it. If only this could be discovered, Le 
Maire would be rich again, and could laugh at 
the pretentions of the East India Company. 

Le Maire did not go to Amsterdam to get the 
necessary funds for his expedition. He inter- 
ested the good people of the little town of 
Hoorn, and with a fine prospectus about his 
"Unknown Southern Land" he soon got all the 
money he needed. The Estates General were 
willing to give him all the privileges he asked 
for provided he did not touch the monopolies 
of their beloved East India Company. Even 
Prince Maurice interested himself sufficiently 
in this voyage to a new continent to give Le 

284 



A NEW STRAIT 

Maire a letter of introduction which put the 
expedition upon more official footing. 

Two small ships were bought, and eighty- 
seven men were engaged for two years. On the 
largest ship of the two, called the Eendracht, 
there were sixty-five men, and on the small yacht 
the Hoorn there were twenty- two. William 
Cornelisz Schouten was commander-in-chief. 
He had made three trips to India by way of 
the cape. Two sons of Le Maire, one called 
Jacques, the other Daniel, went with the expedi- 
tion to keep a watchful eye upon everything and 
to see to it that their father's wishes were care- 
fully executed. The ships were forbidden to en- 
ter the Strait of Magellan. In case of need they 
might return by way of the Cape, but they must 
be careful not to trade with any of the Indian 
princes who now recognized the rule of the East 
India Company. The main purpose of the ex- 
pedition was to find the unknown continent in 
the Pacific. For this main purpose they must 
sacrifice everything else. And so they left 
Hoorn, and they sailed toward the south. 

It was more than twenty years since the first 
285 



A NEW STRAIT 

expedition had sailed for India. The route 
across the Atlantic was well known by this time. 
There is nothing particular to narrate about the 
dull trip of three months enlivened only by the 
attack of a large monster, a sort of unicorn, 
which stuck his horn into the ship with such vio- 
lence that he perished and left behind the horn, 
which was found when the ships were over- 
hauled near the island of Porto Deseado, where 
Van Noort, too, had made ready for his trip 
through the strait many years before. 

The cleaning of the smaller of the two ves- 
sels, however, was done so carelessly that it 
caught fire. Since it had been placed on a high 
bank at high tide and the water had ebbed, there 
was no water with which to extinguish the con- 
flagration. Except for the guns, the entire ship 
and its contents were lost. 

The sailors were taken on board the Een- 
dracht, and on the thirteenth of January of the 
year 1616 the ship passed by the entrance of the 
Strait of Magellan and began to search for a 
new thoroughfare into the Pacific farther toward 
the South. On the twenty-third of January the 

287 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

most eastern promontory of Tierra del Fuego 
was seen. The next day the high mountains of 
another little island further toward the east ap- 
peared in the distance. Evidently Le Maire 
had been right in his calculations. There was 
another strait, and the Eendracht had discovered 
it. Such big events are usually very simple af- 
fairs. The southernmost point of Tierra del 
Fuego was easily reached and was called Cape 
Hoorn, after the town which had equipped the 
expedition. The Eendracht now sailed further 
westward, and in less than two weeks found her- 
self in the Pacific Ocean. On the twelfth of 
February the great discovery was celebrated 
with a party for the benefit of the sailors. They 
had been the first to pass through the Strait of 
Jacques le Maire and the dangerous route dis- 
covered by Magellan ninety-five years before 
could now be given up for the safer and shorter 
passage through Strait le Maire and the open 
water south of Tierra del Fuego. 

The ship had an easy voyage until it dropped 
its anchors before Juan Fernandez, the famous 
island of Robinson Crusoe. It was found to be 

288 



A NEW STRAIT 




the little paradise which De Foe afterward 
painted in his entertaining novel. Fresh water 
was taken on board, and the voyage was contin- 
ued. After a month of rapid progress, with a 
good eastern wind, land was seen. It was a 
small coral island, probably one of the Paomuta 
group. Some men swam ashore, for it was im- 
possible to use the boat on account of the heavy 
surf. They saw nothing but a flat, naked island 
and three strange dogs that did not bark. 
They found some fresh fruit, which they 
brought back to the ship for the sick people. 
Of course there were sick people. That was a 
part of every voyage. But the illness was not 
serious. Four days later they discovered a sec- 
ond island somewhat larger. This was inhab- 
ited. A canoe with painted savages came out 
to the Dutch ship. Since the savages spoke 

289 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

neither Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, nor Malay, 
and the Dutch sailors did not know the Papua 
dialect, it was impossible to have conversation 
with these ignorant people who refused to come 
on board. Captain Schouten was not in need 
of anything, and he went on his way to try his 
luck at the next island. The natives had now 
discovered that there was no harm in this 
strange, large floating object. They came 
climbing over all the sides of the ship. They 
stole brass nails and small metal objects, hid 
them in their wooly and long hair, and then 
jumped overboard. Everywhere the same 
thing happened. Schouten sailed from one 
island to the next, but of any new continent, 
however, he found no sign. When you look at 
the map you will notice that this part of the 
Pacific is thickly dotted with small islands. 
Their inhabitants are great mariners, and in 
their little boats travel long distances. Schouten 
with his big ship caused great consternation 
among these simple fishermen, who hastily fled 
whenever they saw this strange big devil bear- 
ing down upon them. 

290 



A NEW STRAIT 

The trip was very pleasant, but it grew tire- 
some to discover nothing but little islands. At 
last, however, on the tenth of May, a big one 
with high mountains and forests was reached. 
It was called Cocos Island because there were 
many cocoanut-trees near the shore. The in- 
habitants of the island, being unfamiliar with 
white people, were very hospitable and were 
willing to trade fresh cocoanuts and other eat- 
able things for a few gifts of trinkets and per- 
haps a small pocket-knife. But jealousy was 
not unknown even in this distant part of the 
South Seas. Soon there was a quarrel between 
those canoes nearest to the ship which had ob- 
tained presents and others too far away to re- 
ceive anything. Also there was a good deal of 
annoyance caused by the fact that the natives 
insisted upon stealing everything they could 
find on the ship. Finally Schouten was obliged 
to appoint a temporary police of Hollanders 
armed with heavy canes to keep the natives in 
their proper place. Otherwise they might have 
stolen the ship itself, just as they had once tried 
to make away with all the boats. Upon that 

291 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

occasion they had made their first acquaintance 
of fire-arms. When they saw what a little bul- 
let could do they respected the mysterious lead 
pipes which made a sudden loud noise and 
killed a man at a hundred yards. Near Cocos 
Island there appeared to be more mountainous 
land, and Schouten decided to visit it. The 
king came out in state in his canoe to greet the 
Dutch captain. He was entertained royally 
with a concert. To show how much he appre- 
ciated the lovely music which he had just heard 
the king yelled and shrieked as loudly as he 
could. It was very funny, and everybody was 
happy. But this pleasant relation did not last 
long, for when the Hollanders were about to 
reciprocate the visit their ship was attacked, and 
several volleys from the large cannon were 
necessary to drive the natives away. These is- 
lands were called the Islands of the Traitors, be- 
cause the king had tried to kill the people whom 
he had invited as his guests, and they are known 
to-day as the Ladrones. 

The Eendracht was now sixteen hundred 
miles to the west of Peru, and as yet the un- 

292 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

known Southern continent had not been discov- 
ered. The wind continued to blow from the 
east. In a council of the officers of the ship it 
was decided to keep a more northern course 
until it could be ascertained with precision 
where they were in this vast expanse of pacific 
water and small coral islands. It was an un- 
fortunate decision. The ship was then very 
near the coast of Australia. Sailing from one 
group of islands to the next it had followed 
a course parallel to the northern coast of the 
continent for which the men were searching 
with great industry. After a while they were 
obliged to land on another island for fresh 
water. They were again entertained by the 
king of the island. He gave a dinner and a 
dance in their honor, and they had a chance to 
admire the graceful motions of the young girls 
of the villages. They must have been among 
the Fiji Islands. Farther westward, however, 
they discovered that the attitude of the natives 
toward them began to change. Evidently they 
were reaching a region where the white man 
was not unknown and was accordingly dis- 

294 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

trusted. Chinese and Japanese objects, here 
and there a knife or a gun of European origin, 
were found among the natives who came pad- 
dling out to the Dutch ship. Their map told 
them that they were approaching the domains 
of the East India Company. It had not been 
their intention to do this, but the reputed 
Southern continent seemed to be a myth. It 
was time for them to try and reach home and 
report their adventures to the owners of the 
ship. 

Sailing along the coast of New Guinea, they 
at last reached the port of Ternate on the seven- 
teenth of September. Here they found a large 
Dutch fleet which had just reached the Indies 
by way of the Strait of Magellan. This fleet 
was under command of Admiral van Spil- 
bergen, who was much surprised to hear that 
the Eendracht had reached the Pacific through 
a new strait. He showed that he did not be- 
lieve the story which Schouten told of his new 
discoveries. If there were such a strait, then 
why had it taken the Eendracht such a long 
time to reach Ternate? etc. The admiral sus- 

296 



A NEW STRAIT 

pected that this ship was a mere interloper sent 
by Le Maire to trade in a region where, ac- 
cording to the instructions of the East Indian 
Company, no other ships than those of the com- 
pany were allowed to engage in commerce. 

This suspicion was very unpleasant for the 
brave Schouten, but there were other things to 
worry him. Before the expedition started old 
Le Maire, a shrewd trader, had thought of the 
possibility that his ships might not be able to 
find this unknown continent. In that case he 
did not want them to come home without some 
profit to himself, and he had invented a scheme 
by which he might perhaps beat the company 
at her own game. The governor-general of 
the Dutch colonies at that time was a certain 
Gerard Reynst, who was known to be an avari- 
cious and dishonest official. Le Maire counted 
upon this, and to his eldest son he had given 
secret instructions which told him what to do 
in such circumstances. The idea was very sim- 
ple. Young Le Maire must bribe Reynst with 
an offer of money or whatever would be most 
acceptable to the governor. In return for this 

297 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Reynst would not be too particular if the Een- 
dracht went to some out-of-the-way island and 
bought a few hundred thousand pounds worth 
of spices. 

It was a very happy idea, and it undoubtedly 
would have worked. Unfortunately Reynst had 
just died. His successor was no one less than 
Jan Pietersz Coen, the man of iron who was to 
hammer the few isolated settlements into one 
strong colonial empire. Coen could not be 
bribed. To him the law was the law. The 
Eendracht did not belong to the East India 
Company; therefore, it had no right to be in 
India according to Coen's positive instructions. 
The ship was confiscated. The men were al- 
lowed to return to Holland. And the owners 
were told that they could start a lawsuit in the 
Dutch courts to decide whether the governor- 
general had acted within his rights or not. 

Young Le Maire sailed for Holland very 
much dejected. He had lost his father's ship, 
and nobody would believe him when he told of 
his great discovery of the new and short con- 
nection between the Pacific and the Atlantic. 

298 



A NEW STRAIT 

He died on the way home, died of disappoint- 
ment. His hopes had been so great. He had 
done his task faithfully, and he and Schouten 
had found a large number of new islands and 
had added many thousands of miles of geo- 
graphical information to that part of the map 
which was still covered with the ominous let- 
ters of terra incognita. Yet through an ordi- 
nance which many people did not recognize as 
just he was deprived of the glory which ought 
to have come to him. His younger brother 
reached Holland on the second of July of the 
year 1617, and a week later he appeared in the 
meeting of the Estates General. This time the 
story which he told was believed by his hearers. 
The idea of an old man being the chief mover 
in equipping such a wonderful enterprise with 
the help of his sons and only a small capital 
against all sorts of odds assured Le Maire the 
sympathy of the man in the street. For a while 
Governor-General Coen was highly unpopular. 
Old Le Maire started a suit for the recovery 
of his ship and its contents. After two years of 
pleading he won his case. The East India 

299 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Company was ordered to pay back the value of 
the ship and the goods confiscated. All his of- 
ficial papers were returned to Le Maire. His 
name and that of the little town of Hoorn, given 
to the most southern point of the American con- 
tinent and to the shortest route from the At- 
lantic to the Pacific, tell of this great voyage 
of the year 1618. 



300 



TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 



CHAPTER X 
TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 

IT often happened that ships of the Dutch 
East India Company on their way to the 
Indies were blown out of their course or 
were carried by the currents in a southern di- 
rection. Then they were driven into a part of 
the map which was as yet unknown, and they 
had to find their way about very much as a 
stranger might do who has left the well-known 
track of the desert. Sometimes these ships 
were lost. More often they reached a low, flat 
coast which seemed to extend both east and 
west as far as the eye could reach, which offered 
very little food and very little water, and ap- 
peared to be the shore-line of a vast continent 
which was remarkably poor in both plants and 
animals. Indeed, so unattractive was this big 
island, as it was then supposed to be, to the cap- 
tains of the company that not a single one of 

303 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

them had ever taken the trouble to explore it. 
They had followed the coast-line until once 
more they reached the well-known regions of 
their map, and then they had hastened north- 
ward to the comfortable waters of their own 
Indian Ocean. But of course people talked 
about this mysterious big island, and they won- 
dered. They wondered whether, perhaps, the 
stories of the Old Testament, the stories of the 
golden land of Ophir, which had never yet been 
found, might not yet be proved true in that 
large part of the map which showed a blank 
space and was covered with the letters of terra 
incognita. 

If there were any such land still to be discov- 
ered by any European people, the Dutch East 
India Company decided that they ought to 
benefit by it. Therefore their directors studied 
the question with great care and deliberation. 

A number of expeditions were sent out one 
after the other. In the year 1636 two small 
vessels were ordered to make a careful examina- 
tion of the island of New Guinea, which was 
supposed to be the peninsula part of the un- 

304 



TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 

known Southern continent. But New Guinea 
itself is so large that the two vessels, after 
spending a very long time along the coast, were 
obliged to return without any definite informa- 
tion. 

Anthony van Diemen, the governor-general 
of the Dutch East Indies, however, was a man 
of stubborn purpose, and he refused to discon- 
tinue his search until he should have positive 
knowledge upon this puzzling subject. Six 
years after this first attempt he appointed a cer- 
tain Franz Jacobsz Visscher to study the ques- 
tion theoretically from every possible angle and 
to write him a detailed report. Visscher had 
crossed the Pacific Ocean a few years after the 
discovery of Strait Le Maire, and he had visited 
Japan and China, and was familiar with all the 
better known parts of the Asiatic seas. He set 
to work, and he gave the following advice. 
The ships of the company must take the island 
of Mauritius as their starting-point. They 
must follow a southeastern course until they 
should reach the 54 degree of latitude. If, 
in the meantime, they had not found any land, 

305 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

they must turn toward the east until they should 
reach New Guinea, and from there, using this 
peninsula or island or whatever it was as a 
starting-point, they should establish its correct 
relation to the continent of which it was sup- 
posed to be a solid part. If it should prove to 
be an island, then the ships must chart the strait 
which separated it from the continent, and they 
must find out whether these did not offer a short 
route from India to Strait Le Maire and the 
Atlantic Ocean. 

Van Diemen studied those plans carefully. 
He approved of them, and ordered two ships 
to be made ready for the voyage. They were 
small ships. There was the Heemskerk, with 
sixty men, and the Zeehaen, with only forty. 
Visscher was engaged to act as pilot and gen- 
eral adviser of the expedition. The command 
was given to one Abel Tasman. Like most of 
the great men of the republic, he had made his 
own career. Born in an insignificant village 
in the northern part of the republic somewhere 
in the province of Groningen, — the name of the 
village was Lutjegat, — he had started life as a 

306 



TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 

sailor, had worked his way up through ability 
and force of character, and in the early thirties 
of the seventeenth century he had gone to India. 
Thereafter he had spent most of his life as cap- 
tain or mate of different ships of the company. 
He had been commander of an expedition sent 
out to discover a new gold-land, which, accord- 
ing to rumor, must be situated somewhere off 
the coast of Japan, and although he did not find 
it, — since it did not exist, — he had added many 
new islands to the map of the company. Since 
he was a man of very independent character, he 
was specially fitted to be in command of an ex- 
pedition which might meet with many unfore- 
seen difficulties. 

His instructions gave him absolute freedom 
of action. The chief purpose of this expedition 
was a scientific one. Professional draughtsmen 
were appointed to accompany the Heemskerk 
and make careful maps of everything that 
should be discovered. Special attention must 
be paid to the currents of the ocean and to the 
prevailing direction of the wind. Further- 
more, a careful study of the natives must be 

307 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

made. Their mode of life, their customs, and 
their habits must be investigated, and they must 
be treated with kindness. If the natives should 
come on board and should steal things, the Hol- 
landers must not mind such trifles. The chief 
aim of the expedition was to establish relations 
with whatever races were to be discovered. Of 
course there was little hope of finding anything 
except long-haired Papuans, but if by any 
chance Tasman should discover the unknown 
southland and find that this continent contained 
the rumored riches, he must not show himself 
desirous of getting gold and silver. On the 
contrary, he must show the inhabitants lead and 
brass, and tell them that these two metals were 
the most valuable commodities in the country 
which had sent him upon his voyage. Finally, 
whatever land was found must be annexed of- 
ficially for the benefit of the Estates General of 
the Dutch Republic, and of this fact some last- 
ing memorial must be left upon the coast in the 
form of a written document, well hidden below 
a stone or a board planted in such a way that 
the natives could not destroy it. 

308 



TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 

On the nineteenth of August, Tasman and his 
two ships went to Mauritius, where the tanks 
were filled with fresh water and all the men 
got a holiday. They were given plenty of food 
to strengthen them for the voyage which they 
were about to undertake through the unknown 
seas. After a month of leisure the two ships 
left on the sixth of October of the year 1642 
and started out to discover whatever they might 
find. The farther southward they got the 
colder the climate began to be. Snow and hail 
and fog were the order of the day. Seals ap- 
peared, and everything indicated that they were 
reaching the Arctic Ocean of the Southern 
Hemisphere. Day and night they kept a man 
in the crow's-nest to look for land. Tasman 
offered a reward of money and rum for the 
sailor who should first see a light upon the hori- 
zon, but they found nothing except salt water 
and a cloudy sky. 

Tasman consulted Visscher, and asked him 
whether it would not be better to follow the 
44 degree of latitude than to go farther into 
this stormy region. Since they had been sail- 

309 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

ing in a southern direction for almost a month 
without finding anything at all, Visscher agreed 
to this change in his original plans. Once more 
there followed a couple of weeks of dreary 
travel without the sight of anything hopeful. 







© a 



At last, on the twenty-ninth of November of the 
year 1642, at four o'clock of the afternoon, land 
was seen. Tasman thought that it was part of 
his continent and called it Van Diemen's Land, 
after the governor-general who had sent him 
out. We know that it was an island to the 
south of the Australian continent, and we now 
call it Tasmania. 

On the second of December Tasman tried to 
310 



TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 

go on shore with all his officers, but the weather 
was bad and the surf was too dangerous for 
the small boat of the Heemskerk. The ship's 
carpenter then jumped overboard with the flag 
of the Dutch Republic and a flagpole under his 
arm. He reached the shore, planted his pole, 
and with Tasman and his staff floating on the 
high waves of the Australian surf and applaud- 
ing him the carpenter hoisted the orange, white, 
and blue colors which were to show to all the 
world that the white man had taken possession 
of a new part of the world. The carpenter 
once more swam through the waves, was pulled 
back into the boat, and the first ceremony con- 
nected with the Southern continent was over. 

The voyage was then continued, but nowhere 
could the ships find a safe bay in which they 
might drop anchor. Everywhere the coast ap- 
peared to be dangerous. The surf was high, 
and the wind blew hard. At last, on the eight- 
eenth of December, after another long voyage 
across the open sea, more land was seen. This 
time the coast was even more dangerous than 
it had been in Tasmania and the land was cov- 

3ii 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

ered with high mountains. Furthermore the 
Hollanders had to deal with a new sort of 
native, much more savage and more able to de- 
fend themselves than those who had looked at 
the two ships from the safe distance of Van 
Diemen's Land, but had fled whenever the 
white man tried to come near their shore. 

At first the natives of this new land rowed out 
to the Heemskerk and the Zeehaen and paddled 
around the ships without doing any harm. But 
one day the boat of the Zeehaen tried to return 
their visit. It was at once attacked by the fero- 
cious natives. Three Dutch sailors were killed 
with clubs, and several were wounded with 
spears. Not until after the Heemskerk had 
fired a volley and had sunk a number of canoes 
did the others flee and leave the Dutch boat 
alone. The wounded men were taken on 
board, where several of them died next day. 
Tasman did not dare to risk a further investi- 
gation of this bay with his small vessels, and 
after the loss of several of his small company 
he departed. The place of disaster he called 
Tasman Bay, and sailed farther toward the 

312 



TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 

north. If he had gone a few miles to the east, 
he would have discovered that this was not a 
bay at all but the strait which divides the north- 
ern and southern part of New Zealand. Now 
it is called Cook Strait after the famous British 
sailor who a century later explored that part 
of the world and who found that New Zealand 
is not part of a continent, but a large island 
which offered a splendid chance for a settle- 
ment. It was very fertile, and the natives had 
reached a much higher degree of civilization 
than those of the Australian continent. Cook 
made another interesting discovery. The na- 
tives who had seen the first appearance of the 
white man had been so deeply impressed by 
the arrival of the two Dutch ships that they 
turned their mysterious appearance into a myth. 
This myth had grown in size and importance 
with each new generation, and when Captain 
Cook dropped anchor off the coast of New Zea- 
land and established relations with the natives, 
the latter told him a wonderful story of two 
gigantic vessels which had come to their island 
ever so long ago, and which had been de- 

3i3 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

stroyed by their ancestors while all the men on 
board had been killed. 

It is not easy to follow Tasman on the mod- 
ern map. After leaving Cook Strait he went 
northward, and passing between the most north- 
ern point of the island, which he called Cape 
Maria van Diemen, and a small island which, 
because it was discovered on the sixth of Jan- 
uary, was called the "Three Kings Island," he 
reached open water once more. 

He now took his course due north in the hope 
of reaching some of the islands which Le Maire 
had discovered. Instead of that, on the nine- 
teenth of January, the two ships found several 
islands of the Tonga group, also called the 
Friendly Islands. They baptized these with 
names of local Dutch celebrities and famous 
men in the nautical world of Holland. Near 
one of them, called Amsterdam, because it 
looked a little more promising than any of the 
others, the ships stopped, and once more an at- 
tempt was made to establish amicable relations 
with the natives. These came rowing out to the 
ship, and whenever anything was thrown over- 

3i4 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

board they dived after it and showed an ability 
to swim and to remain under water which ever 
since has been connected with the idea of the 
South Sea population. By means of signs and 
after all sorts of presents, such as little mirrors 




and nails and small knives, had been thrown 
overboard to be fished up by the natives, Tas- 
man got into communication with the Tonga 
people. He showed them a mean, thin chicken 
and pointed to his stomach. The natives un- 
derstood this and brought him fresh food. He 
showed an empty glass and went through the 
motion of drinking. The natives pointed to the 
land and showed him by signs that they knew 

316 



TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 

what was wanted, and that there was fresh 
water to be obtained on shore. 

Gradually the natives lost their fear and 
climbed on board. In exchange for the cocoa- 
nuts which they brought they received a plenti- 
ful supply of old rusty nails. When those on 
shore heard that the millennium of useful metal 
had come sailing into their harbor, their eager- 
ness to get their own share was so great that hun- 
dreds of them came swimming out to the Dutch 
vessels to offer their wares before the supply of 
nails should be exhausted. Tasman himself 
went on land, and the relations between native 
and visitor were so pleasant that the first appear- 
ance of the white man became the subject of a 
Tonga epic which was still recited among the 
natives when the next European ship landed 
here a century and a quarter later. 

Going from island to island and everywhere 
meeting with the same sort of long-haired, vigor- 
ous-looking men, Tasman now sailed in a south- 
western direction. He spent several weeks be- 
tween the Fiji Islands and the group now called 

3i7 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Samoa. During all this time his ships were in 
grave danger of running upon the hidden reefs 
which are plentiful in this part of the Pacific. 
At last the winter began to approach and the 
weather grew more and more unstable, and as 
the ships after their long voyage were in need 
of a safe harbor and repair, it was decided to 
try and return within the confines of the map of 
the known and explored world. Accordingly 
the ships sailed westward and discovered several 
islands of the Solomon group, sailed through 
the Bismarck Archipelago, as it is called now, 
and after several months reached the northern 
part of New Guinea, which they, too, supposed 
to be the northern coast of the large continent 
of which they had touched the shores at so many 
spots, but which instead of the promised Ophir 
was a dreary, flat land surrounded by little is- 
lands full of cocoanuts, natives, and palm-trees, 
but without a scrap of either gold or silver. 

Tasman then found himself in well-known 
regions. He made straightway for Batavia, and 
on the fifteenth of June of the year 1644 he 
landed to report his adventures to the governor- 

3i8 



TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 

general and the council of the Indian Company. 
A few months later he was sent out upon a new 
expedition, this time with three ships. He 
made a detailed investigation of the northern 




coast of the real Australian continent. He 
sailed into the Gulf of Carpentaria. He found 
the Torres Strait, which he supposed to be a 
bay between New Guinea and Australia, — for 
the report of the Torres discovery in 1607 was 
as yet in the dusty archives of Manila, and had 
not been given to the world, — and once more 
he returned by way of the western coast of 
New Guinea to inform the governor-general 
that whatever continent he had found produced 

3i9 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

nothing which could be of any material profit 
to the Dutch East India Company. In short, 
New Holland, as Australia was then called, 
was not settled by the Hollanders because it had 
no immediate commercial value. After this 
last voyage no further expeditions were sent out 




to look for the supposed Southern Continent. 
From the reports of several ships which had 
reached the west coast of Australia and from the 
information brought home by Tasman it was 
decided that whatever land there might still 
be hidden between the no and in degree of 
longitude, offered no inducements to a respect- 

320 



TASMAN EXPLORES AUSTRALIA 

able trading company which looked for gold 
and silver and spices, but had no use for kanga- 
roos and the duck-billed platypus. New Hol- 
land was left alone until the growing population 
of the European continent drove other nations 
to explore this part of the world once more a 
hundred and twenty years later. 



321 



ROGGEVEEN, THE LAST OF THE 
GREAT VOYAGERS 



CHAPTER XI 

ROGGEVEEN, THE LAST OF THE 
GREAT VOYAGERS 

THE Hollanders entered the field of geo- 
graphical exploration at a late date. 
The Spaniards and the Portuguese had 
discovered and navigated distant parts of the 
world for almost two centuries before the Hol- 
lander began to leave his own shores. But 
when we remember that they were a small na- 
tion and were engaged upon one of the most 
gigantic wars which was ever fought, the re- 
sult of their labors as pioneers of the map was 
considerable. They found Spitsbergen and 
many new islands in the Arctic, and gave us 
the first reliable information about the imprac- 
ticability of the Northeastern Passage. They 
discovered a new route to the Pacific shorter 
and less dangerous than the Strait of Magellan. 

325 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

They charted the southern part of the Pacific, 
and made the first scientific inspection of the 
Australian continent, besides discovering New 
Zealand and Tasmania. They discovered a 
number of new islands in the Indian Ocean and 
settled upon the fertile islands of Mauritius. 
Of course I now enumerate only the names of 
their actual discoveries. They established set- 
tlements in North and South America and all 
over Asia and in many places of Africa. They 
opened a small window into the mysterious Jap- 
anese Empire, and got into relation with the 
Son of Heaven who resided in Peking. They 
founded a very prosperous colony in South 
Africa. They had colonies along the Red Sea 
and the Gulf of Persia. But about these colo- 
nies I shall tell in another book. This time I 
give only the story of the voyages of actual dis- 
covery. The adventures of men who set out to 
perform the work of pioneers, the career of 
navigators who had convinced themselves that 
here or there a new continent or an undiscov- 
ered cape or a forgotten island awaited their 
curious eyes, and who then risked their fortunes 

326 



LAST OF THE GREAT VOYAGERS 

and their lives to realize their dreams; in one 
word, the men of constructive vision who are of 
greater value to their world than any others be- 




cause they show the human race the road of the 
future. 

In Holland the last of those was a certain 
Jacob Roggeveen, a man of deep learning, for 
many years a member of the High Tribunal of 
the Indies, and a leader among his fellow-beings 
wherever he went. He had traveled a great 
deal, and he might have spent the rest of his few 
years peacefully at home, but when he was sixty- 
two years old the desire to learn more of the 

327 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

Southern Continent which had been seen, but 
which had never been thoroughly explored, the 
wish to know definitely whether there remained 
anything as yet undiscovered in the Pacific 
Ocean, drove him across the equator. With 
three ships and six hundred men he left Texel 
on the first of August of the year 1721, and the 
next year in February he was near Juan Fernan- 
dez in the Pacific Ocean. An expedition like 
this had never been seen before. All the expe- 
rience of past years had been studied most care- 
fully. It was known that people fell ill and 
died of scurvy because they did not get enough 
fresh vegetables. Wooden boxes filled with 
earth were therefore placed along the bulwarks 
of all the ships. In these some simple and hardy 
vegetables were planted. Instead of the old 
method of taking boxes full of bread which 
turned sour and got moldy, ovens were placed on 
board, and flour was taken along from which to 
bake bread. An attempt was made to preserve 
carrots and beets in boxes filled with powdered 
peat. People still fell ill during this voyage, 
but the wholesale death of at least half of the 

328 



LAST OF THE GREAT VOYAGERS 

crew of which we read in all the old voyages 
did not take place. When Roggeveen reached 
Juan Fernandez he found the cabin of Robinson 
Crusoe just as it had been left in the year 1709. 
Otherwise the island proved to be uninhabited. 







On the seventeenth of March the ships continued 
their way, and a southern course was taken. 
Nothing was seen until Easter day, when a new 
island was found on the spot where an English 
map hinted at the existence of a large continent. 
This island, however, contained nothing except 
a few natives. It did not in the least resemble 
the unknown Southern Continent of which Rog- 

329 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

geveen dreamed. Therefore he went farther 
toward the south. For a while he followed the 
route taken many years before by Le Maire. 
Some of the islands which Le Maire had visited 
he found on his map. Others he could not 
locate. Still others were now seen for the first 
time. It was a very dangerous sea to navigate. 
The Pacific Ocean is full of reefs. These reefs 
now appear upon the map, but even in this day 
of scientific navigation they wreck many a ship. 
On the nineteenth of April one of Roggeveen's 
ships ran upon such a hidden reef in the middle 
of the night. The crew was saved, and was 
divided among the other two vessels. The ship, 
however, was a total loss. Nothing could be 
saved of the personal belongings of the men and 
the provisions. It is a curious fact that the 
South Sea islands always have had a wonderful 
fascination for a certain kind of temperament. 
Many times while ships crossed the Pacific in 
the seventeenth and eighteenth century sailors 
preferred to remain behind on some small island 
and spend the rest of their lives there with the 
natives and the fine weather and the long days 

33o 



LAST OF THE GREAT VOYAGERS 

of lazy ease. Five of Roggeveen's crew re- 
mained behind on one of those islands, and when 
in the year 1764 the British explored the King 
George Archipelago, they actually found one 
of these five, then a very old man. 

More than half a year was spent by Rogge- 
veen in exploring the hundreds of islands and 
the many groups of larger islands which the in- 
dustrious coral insect had built upon the bottom 
of the ocean. He found the Samoan Islands, 
and visited several of the Fiji group. Every- 
where he met with the same sort of natives. 
How they got there was a puzzle to Roggeveen. 
They must have come from some large conti- 
nent, and he intended to find that continent. 
But time went by, and his supplies dwindled 
away, and he did not see anything that resem- 
bled his famous continent. Whenever a new 
peak appeared upon the horizon, there was 
hope of reaching the land of promise. But 
from near by the peak always proved to be an- 
other rock sticking out of a placid sea, and giv- 
ing shelter to a few thousand naked savages. 

Roggeveen did not stop his search until his 
33i 



DUTCH NAVIGATORS 

men began to get sick and until he had eaten his 
last piece of bread. Finally, when two-thirds 
of the crew had died, he considered himself 
beaten in his search, and after visiting New 
Guinea he went to the Indies. This expedition, 
the last one to sail forth to find the land of Ophir 
of the Old Testament, was a failure. We have 
been obliged to make the same observation about 
many of the other voyages which we have 
described in this little book. 

It is true they added some positive knowledge 
to the map. They located new islands and 
described rivers and reefs and currents and the 
velocity or absence of wind in distant parts of 
the Pacific Ocean ; but they always cost the lives 
of many people, and they ruined the investors 
in a most cruel fashion. 

Yet they had one great advantage: They 
forced people to leave their comfortable homes. 
They made them go forth and search for things 
about which they had had expectant visions. 
To the rest of the world they gave the tangible 
sign that in this little Dutch corner of the North 
Sea there lived a people of enterprise and cour- 

332 



LAST OF THE GREAT VOYAGERS 

age who, although very rich, could yet see be- 
yond mere material gain. 
And what more can we ask? 

The Author wishes to state his indebtedness 
to the work of Dr. de Boer, who first of all 
turned the lengthy and often tedious reports of 
foreign travel into a concise and readable form 
and brought the knowledge of these early ad- 
ventures among a larger number of readers than 
before. Copies of the voyages in original and 
reprint can be found in many American libra- 
ries. The material for illustrations is very 
complete. Where no originals were available 
reprints were made from the pictures which the 
publishing firm of Meulenhof and Co. of Am- 
sterdam printed in Dr. de Boer's first series of 
ancient voyages. 



THE END 



333 



